


Neighborhood Of A Family

by bomberqueen17



Series: Now And At The Hour Of Our Death [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M, Wakes & Funerals, discussion of past coerced sex, offhand discussion of sex work, spiritually affirming threesomes, this has been nearly-completed for over a year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 06:47:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9111235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: Bucky makes his peace with the survivors of his family (heavily drawn from the version of the Barnes/Murphy clan outlined in A Face Built For Gettin Punched and with a lot drawn from my own downstate relatives), Natasha does security escort, and then she and Steve and Bucky have a little private reconciliation of their own.Then there's some emotional fallout from that, for Natasha.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I did not mean to go on hiatus for a year. This story was complete but for the last, mm, thousand words of the second chapter, but I kept having other things I had to think about, and I was concerned that it didn't pick up where the end of FoG left off, and I just wasn't sure where to put it. But it's been a year, and I'm going to finish and post it. (I plan on getting the whole thing up before the new year, but we'll see.)
> 
> At this point I don't know where I meant to leave off with Full of Grace. This is a bridge to the planned next bit of the saga. There is a bunch more, I'm just not sure what's going where, what's getting finished, what's getting left unsaid, etcetera.
> 
> It really doesn't help that I have hated every MCU movie since Winter Soldier. It turns out, I don't actually like the MCU. I just really liked that one movie. I had hoped I'd get some more inspiration, but every movie since has just been kind of a middle finger to most of the promises Winter Soldier made. So, whatever. We'll see what I can do.
> 
> Here's a little bit of fun for you, and some emotional devastation. I hope it satisfies.
> 
> (TWs for alcohol, discussion of sex work [sort of?}, mentions of past use of sex as a survival tool, that sort of thing. Please take care of yourselves! All sex in this story is unambiguously consensual!)

“Grandpa!” Maria said, crossing the room to latch the window, which had come loose and was flapping in the breeze. “Why did you open the window? It’s too cold for that!”

“I didn’t,” her grandfather said, looking over at it in bemusement. He was in his chair, wrapped in a blanket. Clearly he hadn’t considered himself too warm. “It just blew open.”

“It should have been latched,” Maria said. She was sure it had been latched, she checked the windows herself pretty often. She tried to remember back when it had been open last. They hadn’t had any really warm days in a while. She opened it to air the room out once a week when she changed the sheets, because she didn’t want it to get to smelling too much like old man, but that had been on Thursday and she knew she’d latched it again after. 

“Oh,” Grandpa said, “I know. It was Bucky.”

Maria turned to look at him. “It was what?”

“Bucky,” Grandpa said. “He came by to visit, night before last, didn’t I tell you?”

“Bucky,” she repeated flatly.

“Oh,” he said, “it was your mother I told. I’m sorry, I forgot. He came in at night, through the window, so he wouldn’t scare anybody else. I was sure your mother would pass it on, I was so happy to see him!”

Maria shook her head. “Bucky,” she said again, frowning. “Is this— what is a bucky?”

“My cousin Bucky,” Grandpa said, affronted. “You know. Bucky Barnes!”

“Oh,” Maria said. “What? Grandpa, the one you were on TV saying was dead and this crazy assassin guy was an impostor?”

Grandpa drew himself up with dignity. “I was wrong,” he said. “It happens to the best of us. His story is pretty out there. But it’s true, it’s really him. And he stopped by to see little Johnny, and see if I really meant it, that it wasn’t him. Because he has memory problems sometimes, and he was worried that maybe I was right, and he wasn’t really him.”

“But he is,” Maria said, blinking in disbelief.

“Yes,” Grandpa said. “It is him, and I was wrong, but in my defense I couldn’t have understood what they did to him to make him do those things.”

“And Bucky came in the window,” Maria said. She knew it was true, that Grandpa’s cousin had really been the real Bucky Barnes, and that he’d been babysat by Bucky back in the day. They’d met Steve Rogers, she’d been there; Captain America himself had hugged her grandpa and cried and called him little Johnny. It had really been something. 

But Grandpa had been a little more confused lately. The news crews had caught him on one of his mean days, and Maria was still mad at them; Grandpa had looked kooky and old and had said viciously that his cousin Bucky hadn’t been any assassin and this guy out there couldn’t be him. He’d come across as really mean and old. But… 

He  _ was _ old, he was really old. And he was more and more confused lately, and less lucid, and his kidney disease wasn’t improving things at all. 

“He did,” Grandpa said, waving. “About scared the pants off me, I know, when I woke up and saw him sitting there. He hadn’t really meant to wake me up, he said, but he just wanted to see me, because he couldn’t really understand how many years it had been, he didn’t really understand what happened to him either…” 

“So he came in the window,” Maria said, “and he didn’t shut it behind himself when he left.”

“He must not have latched it,” Grandpa said. “But I don’t know that he’d be able to, from the outside.”

“Mm-hmm,” Maria said, inspecting the latch. “Well, as long as he didn’t scare you too much.”

“He was so sad,” Grandpa said. “He was so tired and sad, Maria. It’s not right, what happened, and I’m sorry for what I said on the TV. Do you think they’d let me take it back?”

“I don’t think they really care about the truth, Grandpa,” Maria said. 

 

________

  
  


James was ironing when she got home, and there was a pot on the stove, and the apartment smelled lovely. Natasha couldn’t get used to that, couldn’t get used to being unironically taken care of without ulterior motives like that. 

“I didn’t eat yet,” James said over his shoulder, and set the iron down. He seemed to really love the electric iron with the steam settings; he’d bought a fancier one than the basic one she’d owned, and used it really often. “But it should be done by now.”

“Smells great,” she said, and didn’t ask how he’d known when she’d be home. She’d known he’d be here because there was a tracking app on his phone he could enable for her, and often would. 

He didn’t seem to know about the tracking device in the tread of the boots he most often wore, and she wondered if he really didn’t know, or if he pretended not to, to humor her. When she’d planted it she’d been sure it was undetectable, but since then she’d learned more about his augmentations, and it seemed likely to her that he’d know it was there. He didn’t always wear those boots, but he did most of the time, and always when he was on missions.

“Found a recipe on the Internet,” he said. He shook out the thing he’d been ironing, which was a suit jacket, and hung it up on the hanger next to the rest of the pieces of the suit. It was an old-fashioned one, nice quality but not exceptional, and three-piece. 

“New suit?” she asked. He had not a great deal of clothing, most of it tactical; she was in the habit of picking up civvies for him to blend in different places. 

“Found a secondhand one,” he said, “had it tailored. You know how hard it is to find a decent tailor nowadays who doesn’t want the earth just to take in every seam on a suit that’s not the shoulders?” He smiled, sweet and self-deprecating. “Found a guy older than me to do it, couldn’t believe he’s still workin’. He did a pretty good job, but I wanted to press it better.”

“What you need a suit for?” Natasha asked, stepping into his space now that the iron was safely off. 

“Man needs a suit,” James said, flippant, but he looked a little sad. He slid his hand around the back of her waist and dipped his head to kiss her softly. “How was your day, beautiful?”

She laughed at how conventional he sounded, and also a little bit in self-consciousness at herself for how much she liked it, and kissed him back. “Fine,” she said. “I, ah. The girls were teasing me about having a boyfriend.”

He kissed her again, both hands on her waist now. “You call me a boyfriend?” he asked, surprised. 

She smiled up at him. “It’s come up in conversation,” she said. “I dunno, I never have had an actual boyfriend, I wouldn’t know how that works.”

He made a funny-sad wry face. “I had girlfriends,” he said, “but it was a different world, I tell you what.”

It made her think. She put her hands on his chest, noting that he had a new shirt on— just a long-sleeved t-shirt, and by the slight fading at the seams it wasn’t brand new, but she hadn’t seen it before. He’d probably hit a lot of thrift stores to find a suit with shoulders big enough for him to get the rest taken in, so it stood to reason he’d have picked up some stuff like this. He made decent money, she was sure; Fury didn’t pay him a lot, but she knew his going rate for other jobs. But frugality was a good habit, and she didn’t spend a great deal of money on clothing either.

“Was there,” she said, trying to put the question together carefully, and falling short. “Like for Steve, with Peggy— was there anyone you had to leave behind?” She winced inwardly at how awkward that sounded, and looked up at him. 

He made a wry face. “Nah,” he said, “not like that. Not— I dated some girls, but I never got past havin’ a little fun here and there. I was—“ He made another face, bit his lip. “Truth is, I was real hung up on Steve. We had a whole weird thing goin’ on, and I just couldn’t sort out what I wanted, and he sure wasn’t much help.”

“Really,” Natasha said, truly shocked. 

His smile was sad and not at all mocking. “Yeah,” he said, “really.” He ran his thumb along her cheekbone. “They didn’t invent gays in the sixties, y’know. But back then it was, well— it’s complicated now, don’t try to tell me it’s all better. There are as many different ways to love a person as there are people. And even now being as quote- _ normal _ as possible is still a pretty attractive pull. Steve was already on the edge of respectable, with the way he looked— he didn’t know what to do with the way I was about him.” James shrugged. “So I dated other people, but I just, I wasn’t really sure what I was gonna do, and then the war made it seem like it was pretty stupid to get too involved in planning on anything for the future.”

His smile was sad. “I was right, as it turns out.”

“What about now?” Natasha asked. 

“I’m still hung up on him,” James said, “but in a different way now.” He looked at Natasha, really looked at her, and she had a weird stabbing feeling like he could see parts of her she didn’t intend, which was pretty fundamentally unsettling. “I’m pretty stuck on you, as it happens, and I’m lucky you seem to be puttin’ up with that pretty well.” 

“I have gotten pretty used to you,” Natasha admitted. 

He smiled, at that. “Y’know,” he said, “I’ve gotten kind of a raw deal on a lotta things, in this life, but despite all that, I’m pretty lucky.”

“Steve Rogers,” Natasha said, with an air of wonderment. And she thought about it, thought about Steve’s little eyebrow quirks, about his pouting lower lip, about his unreal eyelashes, and thought about how that must have looked when he was five feet four— her height— and what that would have been like.

“And Natasha Romanoff,” James said. 

“And the ghost,” she said, making herself bring it up. “The one they overwrote with me.”

James considered her, the skin of his fingers gentle on the back of her neck. “Whether she was real or not,” he said, “I was lucky to have that too.” 

She stood on her toes to kiss him, and he slid his hand around the back of her head and held her steady to kiss her. “You deserve better even than that,” she whispered. “If I could be better to you, I would, James, but I’m lousy at this.”

“I don’t think there’s a thing you’re bad at in this world,” he said, laughing as he straightened up. “C’mon, dinner’ll burn if I leave it on the stove any longer.”

She let him hold onto her hand as he led her into the kitchen, and seated her at the table like she was visiting royalty as he set the table and served her. Curried cauliflower, with chicken shredded in it. Nothing like anything she’d ever made before, nothing like anything he’d have known in his former life. The sauce base was diced fresh tomatoes, and it had whole mustard seeds in it that she could pop between her teeth. It was very good, and somehow, very homey. 

“The girls all wanted me to tell them juicy details of our love life,” she said, sipping at her beer. 

“Did you?” he asked, with a knowing glint in his eye. 

“I wouldn’t usually,” she said. “I don’t like to talk about things like that. But I decided, what the hell. So now everyone in the Avengers Academy knows you’re a god in the sack, James.”

He threw his head back with a laugh. “Did you really,” he said. 

“I only told the truth,” she said. “I thought about it, and what could anyone use against us, from that? Nothing. So I made every one of them jealous.”

He was still laughing. “You goofball,” he said. 

“James,” she said, “even in this modern age, there are not a lot of guys whose idea of a great Saturday morning is to make their girlfriend come so many times she loses her voice.”

“Oh,” he said, eyes going a little distant, “that was a good time.”

“And most guys don’t have the kind of breathing control you do,” she went on. “Or single-minded dedication. Or jaw strength.”

He sucked his lower lip into his mouth. “I, ah,” he said. “I like what I like, what can I say?”

“So I didn’t tell them anything incriminating,” she said, “but I probably gave them a very different impression of you than they’d get pretty much anywhere else.”

“When you say, the girls,” he said, “who-all was there?”

“Jess Drew, Sharon Carter, Bobbi Morse, Wanda Maximoff,” Natasha said. “But I mean, none of them are gonna keep that to themselves.”

He laughed. “Well,” he said, looking down, “I guess it’s better than any of the other rumors goin’ around about me.” And there was a little bitterness in that, under the humor. 

She reached over and took his hand. “Anything new?” she asked. 

He shook his head, and laced his fingers through hers. “Nothing different,” he said. “It’s.” He shrugged. He was clearly gathering himself to tell her something, so she sipped her beer with her free hand and waited, feeling the calluses and rough skin of his hand and smiling a little to herself. 

“They were pretty bitterly jealous,” she said. “I’ve made a lot of women jealous in my time but never so deservedly.”

He laughed silently, eyes crinkling up in the corners even if his mouth still looked a little sad. And it gave him the courage to say what he’d been working up to. “So I think I need your help on a mission.”

“You’ve earned my cooperation, surely,” she said, understanding that if it was a regular old kill-HYDRA mission, he wouldn’t have hesitated at all. “Is it a difficult one?”

“A funeral,” he said, and looked up at her, solemn. 

“I can do that,” she said. “Whose?”

He chewed on his lower lip a moment, collecting himself. “Cousin Johnny,” he said. 

She considered him a moment. “Of course,” she said. 

  
  
  


“People don’t always wear suits to funerals,” she said, leaning in the bathroom door and watching as James shaved. He was using an old-fashioned single-edge razor in a holder, which she hadn’t known you could still get. She hadn’t watched him shave before, though she knew he did it in her apartment. 

“I know they don’t,” James said, “and it’s fucked-up they don’t, I’ll tell you what.” He wasn’t kidding, he wasn’t being light-hearted or laughing. So she mentally sorted through her outfits and settled on a black dress she knew she had, just above knee length, pencil skirt but not too tight, opaque stockings, she knew she had a pair, cropped jacket, room for a shoulder holster unobtrusively, hmm… A hat, James would expect a hat and she had a understatedly stylish-enough one that it might not stand out. She’d look a little old-fashioned, but would match him. Shoes. Low heels. No, sharp stylish designer heels, improbably attractive, to take attention away from James. Did she have a clutch that would match that wasn’t too bedazzled? Probably. Unless she’d lost that one. No.

She watched James run the razor with practiced ease along the sharp edge of his gorgeous jaw, then pushed off the doorframe and went along to sort through her purse bin to find her second-best black clutch purse. The best one had gotten ditched on a mission, which was a pity, but at least she remembered and hadn’t wasted time hunting for it. 

She checked her phone while she waited for her curling iron to heat up. Steve had texted her.  _ Bucky ok? _

Ah.  _ Are you going to this funeral? _

_ Yeah _ , Steve wrote,  _ he asked me to. Figured nobody’d look at him twice if I was there. _

Hm.  _ That means you can’t acknowledge him _ , she wrote back.

_ Not where anyone’s looking, no, _ Steve wrote.  _ And I’m prepared to do that, I know this is important to him and I want him to feel like he can go. _

_ I’m going too _ , Natasha wrote. 

_ Good _ , Steve said. After a moment, he added,  _ Is it better or worse if I pretend I don’t recognize you either? _

She considered it.  _ Better _ , she wrote.  _ People are usually not quite sure if I’m me. If you don’t acknowledge me they’ll assume they’re wrong.  _

_ Ok, _ Steve wrote. Then he followed it up with a  _ :(.  _

_ :( _ she wrote back.  _ But I bet we can hang out after. _

_ :) _ , he wrote. She smiled at her phone, then set it down and angled the mirror on her vanity to let her curl her hair properly. 

  
  
  


Maria sort of hadn’t expected that Ana would be able to sit still through a whole Mass, but she’d forgotten to make sure she was sitting on the outer edge of the pew for an easy escape. Having Captain Ohmygod America sitting next to her bought her some time; she set Ana down next to him and he obligingly made faces at her, which cowed her into silence at first as she peered shyly up at him. She warmed up to him pretty quickly, and the next time they had to stand, Cap actually picked her up and held her, which delighted her. 

“Mommy, Ana so high,” she said. 

“You are so high up,” Maria answered her fondly, then put her finger to her lips. “Shh!”

Cap put his face near hers and murmured something in her ear, then bent to listen, and Ana-- well, Maria cringed a little; Ana didn’t know how to whisper yet, she only had two volumes, yelling and shrieking. So she kind of yelled indistinctly into Cap’s ear, and he laughed silently, and they sat down again, and then there was kneeling, and Ana wanted to go under the pews, and Cap’s arms were long enough to deftly drag her back, and then she needed Mommy to “hold you” for a little bit, and then she wanted to yell and then there was some crying, and Maria had to excuse herself because not even Cap could fix this quietly. 

There was always a room near the vestibule for crying babies. Maria made her way back to it and had to sort of elbow her way through a bunch of total strangers, which made her angry-- none of these people had ever known or cared about her grandfather or her family, they were only here because of all the Bucky Barnes bullshit and were of the same ilk as the vultures who’d made the video of Grandpa being a mean old man go viral. 

“Are you Cap’s girlfriend?” one of the random strangers asked, not getting out of her way. She stared at him in blank shock for a moment. 

“If I was don’t you think he’d carry the fuckin’ diaper bag?” she said, and hip-checked him with said diaper bag so that he’d make enough room for her to get by. Ana wailed sharply, and Maria hustled into the crying room and shut the door. 

There were people in the room. There was a fucking news cameraman in the room, going over notes with a person who clearly was the one who was going to be on-camera. “What the actual fuck,” Maria said, “it’s my grandfather’s fucking funeral, not a three-ring circus, can’t we even fucking cry in peace?” 

“Uh,” the news personality person said. 

Ana shrieked and flailed, and one of her shoes fell off.

“Go fucking stand on the sidewalk like the rest of the fucking vultures,” Maria said. Okay maybe she was crying now. “My grandpa was a sweet person and had a whole interesting life of his own and none of you gives a fuck! Get the fuck out!”

The door opened, and it was a man in a dark suit with sunglasses on like the fucking movies or out on Long Island, and he quietly and efficiently took hold of the camera person in one hand, and the on-camera personality in the other, and whisked them silently out the door. In a moment he came back and pulled the door shut behind himself, shoved his glasses up onto his head and said, “I don’t want to cause a commotion with any of the ones in the aisles but I will if you want me to.”

She blinked up at him. “Who the fuck are you?”

The man picked up Ana’s shoe from where she’d kicked it off to, and put it back onto her foot, making one of the wide-eyed goofy faces people who liked kids made at kids. Ana quieted. 

“I’m the reason they’re here,” he said, giving Maria a more understandable, grim expression. And oh. Oh. Holy shit. He was Bucky Barnes. 

“Oh holy shit,” she said. 

“Your mascara,” he said, holding up a handkerchief. 

“Shit,” she said. “No, it’ll wreck that, I got one a’ my own,” and rummaged in her diaper bag, which was tricky. He held out his hands and she automatically deposited Ana into them, and Ana settled against his hip and looked up at him, finger in her mouth, thinking it over. “Did I just,” Maria said to herself, pausing in her rummaging, “hand my baby to the Winter Soldier.”

“You did,” he said, “but for the record, I’m off duty at the moment, you don’t gotta worry about it.”

She found the spit-up rag she’d been looking for and dabbed under her eyes with it, because she might as well. “Waterproof mascara,” she said. “I own like four tubes. I couldn’t find any of it. What a fuckin’ shitshow.”

“I showed up drunk to my dad’s funeral,” the Winter Soldier said. “Figured it was a fitting tribute, since he drank so much.” He had Ana easily balanced on his hip and had given her his sunglasses. She was wearing them inexpertly, and he held them so she didn’t poke herself in the eye and was laughing along with her. “You look great, doll. Those really suit you. Black’s your color.”

“Ana p’etty,” Ana said. 

“Are you Ana?” he asked. How had he understood her? She spoke really well for being not quite two, but she was still not quite two, and usually people didn’t catch what she said on the first try. 

“Ana,” Ana agreed. She reached up and patted the man’s face. He was clean-shaven, and looked exactly, exactly like Bucky Barnes in the old photos, except his hair was pushed behind his ears instead of just short. 

“Your grandpa used to call me Guggy,” he said, then hesitated. “Your-- great-Grandpa.”

“Ga-gapa,” Ana said, and turned to look at Maria. “Wan’ go see Ga-gapa!”

“He lived downstairs,” Maria said, and she was crying again. “We saw him every day.”

“I know,” the Winter Soldier said, and he-- he hugged her, and she was so confused she just went with it. “You look like your great-grandma, how messed-up is this?”

His suit was just the tiniest bit scratchy, like men’s suits were, and he wasn’t as tall as Captain America, and he smelled like a regular guy, aftershave and recently-dry-cleaned wool suit, and he had her baby in his other arm. “You’re really Bucky Barnes,” she said. “Did you really break in and visit my grandpa?”

“I did,” he said, and his voice was thick. “He-- he’s the last person in the whole world who knew me, and I thought, if he didn’t know me, then-- then he was right and I wasn’t-- me. But he did, when he saw me in person he just kind of slumped over and said  _ oh no, it really is you after all _ , and-- there’s nobody who remembers me anymore and all of you are so goddamn familiar but nobody knows me.”

“Steve Rogers knows you,” she said. “He’s-- he’s right there.”

“I asked him to come,” he said. “I asked him to go to the wake for me and I thought if he was here maybe I could come without the press noticing me.” He was crying. That was fucked-up. It was all really fucked-up. 

“Don’t,” Maria said, distressed, and managed to free one of her arms to wrap it around his waist. “Oh God. Grandpa talked about you all the time. Bucky this and Bucky that and Bucky hung the moon. Bucky invented dancing. Bucky singlehandedly generated the concept of being cool.”

The Soldier gave a watery laugh. “Johnny-- he was born the year my family moved back from out west, and he just, I was always around and he was so much fun.” He shook his head. “We just-- there was just, all of us always runnin’ around, like a whole tribe of us, there was always somebody to play along with whatever you had goin’ on. I loved it, I was never lonely.”

“Grandpa talks about the old days, everybody at his grandpa’s house and all the cousins and everybody, like a whole neighborhood of a family,” Maria said. “We still-- it’s different now, I guess, he always said, but we still-- it’s a whole neighborhood.”

“We was,” the Soldier said. “And it--” He stopped talking, and she felt his shoulders shake. “I never saw any of ‘em again. They all died thinkin’ I was dead, and-- and that was better.” She pulled back a little and could see his eyes were squeezed shut. “I’m just sorry-- poor Johnny had to find out.”

“Hush,” Maria said, putting her hand around the back of his neck. She pressed her forehead against his-- he was tall, but he wasn’t so tall she couldn’t pull his head down to reach it. “Hush. It’s okay. He was tough, he could handle the truth.”

He laughed, or maybe sobbed, and his skin was warm under her fingers, he was definitely a real person. “I shouldn’t’a come, it’s a circus in here,” and he pulled back, and Maria started to take Ana from him but Ana dug her fingers in and held on. “As long as nobody figures out it’s me-- that’s what Steve’s here for, they’ll just look at him.”

“C’mon, Ana,” Maria said, “it’ll be Communion soon, we should get back out there.”

Ana wrapped her arms around the Soldier’s neck. “Ana stay here,” she said. “Mommy go back out.”

The Soldier laughed, and found his handkerchief to wipe his face. “Baby girl,” he said, “I think everybody would notice if I stole you. You gotta stay with your mama.”

“Steve RSVP’d you to the funeral brunch, didn’t he,” Maria said, making the connection in her head.

“He said he did,” the Soldier said. “I told him I thought it was a bad idea. It’s only gonna get people upset.”

“Whatever,” Maria said. “He was your fuckin’ cousin, you wanna come to brunch, I say it’s okay, and I’m the one organizin’ it.” She gasped suddenly. “You didn’t get to go to the wake,” she said, and grabbed his shoulder, and wasn’t he supposed to have a metal arm? but it felt like a normal shoulder. Maybe it was the other one. The one that was holding her baby. He had gloves on. 

This was so fucked-up.

“It’s okay,” the Soldier said. “I got to talk to him, I paid my respects. I’m okay.”

“You’re sure,” Maria said. 

He nodded, and she could see tears welling in his eyes again. “I figured you’d be a lot less willing to just-- accept that I’m a relative,” he said. 

“I had time to think it over,” Maria said. “Grandpa kept telling me you’d been visiting. I wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t making it up, but Mom and I had time to think about it. And it’s a shame if all the stuff is true about you being an assassin and all but-- you’re a Murphy, right?”

He closed his eyes for a second, and tears spilled. “Yeah,” he said, shakily. 

  
  
  


“Christ, you look hot,” James had told Natasha when he’d seen her outfit for the funeral, and she’d had to respond that so did he. The suit fit him beautifully-- it skimmed him nicely, downplaying his freakish physique a little, perhaps a little looser than current fashion but also better-tailored than current fashion. The waistcoat looked really nice under it, and he wore it without the slightest hint of pretension. He even had managed to get a pair of decent dress shoes. He had his hair slicked back and he looked-- well, he looked like the old photos of Bucky Barnes, and Natasha had wondered for a moment whether that were a good idea. But then he’d put a pair of very modern sunglasses on, and she’d realized it was plenty to tone the effect down. 

He’d snuck them into the back of the church, and did all the Catholic things by rote, the genuflecting and the holy water and all, and he’d stayed on the kneeler for a while after they took their seats, though his mouth didn’t move. Natasha knew he visited a Catholic church irregularly, from the data from the tracker in his bootsole, but she’d noted that his visits didn’t seem to coincide with services. She wondered if he believed, or if he wasn’t sure he did, or if he was trying to remember things or just taking comfort in ritual, but she’d never asked, would never. 

“I wish you’d been able to go to the wake,” she murmured, watching the pallbearers milling about on the sidewalk outside. Steve was among them, she realized belatedly; he was in a black suit and looked steely-jawed and sad. 

“I broke into the funeral home,” James answered, emotionless. “I’d broken into his bedroom enough times, I got to say goodbye. Don’t worry about it.”

“Really,” she said. 

“Oh yeah,” James answered. He had his sunglasses on his head. “I got a video of him admitting I’m really me, but I figured I’d wait and not put it anywhere until, you know, it was all over.”

“Really,” Natasha said. He wasn’t laughing, wasn’t kidding. None of this was funny to him. 

“I didn’t figure his family needed the hassle,” James said. A muscle in his jaw went tight. “Fuckin’ papparazzi out there hassling Steve, I’ve a mind to make ‘em regret it but I don’t want the family to get shit for it.”

“Steve’s a big boy,” Natasha said. Her hat was more of a fascinator, and had a little net veil, and she’d amped it up with a little bit of infrared-emitting mesh to fuck with cameras; she adjusted it slightly and moved so she’d interrupt anyone’s shot from outside the church. 

“Yeah but,” James said, and subsided. The organ had been playing for some time, and now a singer had begun, and the music wasn’t at all familiar. Not that Natasha would know; she’d studied how to fit in at a Mass, just like other types of services, so she generally knew when to stand or sit or kneel and what the various gestures were supposed to mean, but she didn’t know the songs. 

“There’s the hearse,” Natasha murmured, since she had a better line of sight than he did now. 

Everyone rose for the entering procession, and Natasha tucked herself up along James’s side. There were plenty of people in the church who weren’t really mourners, she’d already noted, and more now, slipping in side entrances while the pallbearers organized themselves. After a few long moments, James slipped his hand around hers, and held on. She leaned against him. 

The service was long, as Catholic services were, and James seemed to have no more of a clear idea of when to stand and kneel than she did. “If you’d told me,” he murmured at one point as the pews creaked, “how much the Church had changed, I’d’a never believed you.”

She just wrapped her arm around his bicep and tucked herself back against his side, and he curved toward her, almost unconsciously, as if he were cold and trying to warm himself from her body heat.

He got up suddenly at one point, and was gone for rather a while. Natasha knew better than to crane her neck looking for him, but she spent the entire time on high alert, waiting for a crisis. He slid back in next to her suddenly, and busied himself for a moment cleaning his sunglasses on his handkerchief. His eyes were red; he’d been crying. But what was odd was that his sunglasses were smeared with what looked like snot or spit, and she couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten them so messy.

He surprised her by going up to take Communion. She did not, staying in the pew, but slid carefully over so she could watch him, and she saw him pass Steve, saw him catch Steve’s eye, saw Steve smile a little at him. Steve was tucked into one of the pews with the other pallbearers, and was sat next to a pregnant young woman who seemed not at all overawed by him. 

James came back and slid down onto the kneeler again, elbows propped on the back of the pew in front of him, hands in front of his face, and he stayed like that for a long time. Natasha couldn’t see his face, but the light caught the edge of his eyelashes a little, and she could see that his eyes were closed. 

He only sat back when the priest began to talk again, and she pressed her arm against his and he did not turn to look at her. 

Her phone vibrated, and she pulled it out carefully, keeping it down next to her side. It was a text from Steve, and it had an address. She poked at it, and it was the address of a restaurant. She replied with a question mark, and only then noticed that the message was a group text, to her and to James. 

She put her phone away, and paid attention to the rest of the service. Fine words, here and there, and the Catholic ceremony was a nice one, very ancient-feeling but pragmatic for the most part, enough pomp to lend gravity to it without too much fanciness. She wondered, though, how James felt, since the reforms had happened after his… departure from his first life. Perhaps the High Anglican services would be more familiar to him. 

She wasn’t going to ask.

Finally it was time for the procession out, and she watched Steve look solemn and regal as he held the railing at the edge of the casket. He did flick a glance at her, and she met his eyes and nodded solemnly. He twitched an eyebrow the tiniest bit; she’d worn bright scarlet lipstick, which she knew was his favorite color when it came to lipstick. They’d discussed it at some length, at one point. She’d gone for more of a subdued look overall, but the lipstick had been for him. 

She looked, then, for the pregnant lady who’d been sitting next to him, and she wasn’t far behind. Immediate family of the deceased, then. Late twenties or early thirties, dark hair and eyes, olive skin, but her mouth looked like James’s; blood relation, likely, not by marriage. She noticed Natasha’s regard and glanced at her, and her eyes slid past to catch on James. Strangely, the woman beamed at him for a moment, before the procession swept her onward. 

“Her name is Maria,” James murmured in Natasha’s ear. “Johnny’s granddaughter. He lived in her building and she took care of him a lot toward the end.”

“How much time did you spend hanging around these people?” Natasha asked, amused. 

“You don’t usually ask what I get up to when I ain’t around you,” James pointed out, and she turned to look at him. He looked tired and sad. 

“I don’t usually figure it’s my business,” she said. “If you need help, you ask me, and then it’s my business.”

He pulled his mouth to one side. “A lot,” he said. “I spent a lot of time over there.” 

“And you never talked to anyone but him?” Natasha asked. 

“He was the last person alive in the world who knew me,” James answered. 

“Besides Steve,” she pointed out.

James let his breath out slowly. “Besides Steve,” he said. And then he pulled out his phone and poked it. “That’s the funeral brunch,” he said. “The address Steve texted. He wants us to come. He RSVP’d for us to be there.”

“Is that wise?” Natasha asked. 

“They’re pretty tight on the guest list,” James said. “So no media and no snoops.”

“Then, if you want,” Natasha said, “I can either come with you or keep watch.”

“You don’t gotta keep watch,” James said. He took her hand, and held onto it. “I dunno. If you think it’s a good idea. I’m not used to-- this kind of work.”

“Does anyone from the family know— about you?” Natasha asked.

“Just Maria,” James said. “I talked to her just now, threw some reporters out who were bothering her.” He pulled his sunglasses down. “Her kid chewed on my sunglasses.” He looked pleased about that.

“And she— you told her who you were,” Natasha said, shocked. 

“Yeah,” James said. His smile went a little watery. “She said I was still a Murphy, wasn’t I?”

That was the dead man’s last name, Murphy. Natasha realized that the strange sensation in her gut was  _ jealousy _ . She didn’t even know what her own name had been, let alone her mother’s, and James, after 75 years, still had this? Well, jealousy was inappropriate, so she squashed it, and took his arm as they walked out of the church. 

  
  
  


“So that’s Bucky Barnes,” Maria said to her mother, pointing out the limousine window as they all piled in. Steve Rogers had gotten shuffled into their limo, and his head whipped around. 

“Is it really,” Mom said, leaning over to look. Bucky was standing in the church doorway, sunglasses back on, but now that she looked Maria could see the family resemblance in his build. His jaw looked like her cousin Patrick’s, and the lean sturdiness of his body, he was just-- more so. And he had an absolutely stunning woman on his arm, movie-star curvy and stylish with a little cap with netting, and bright red hair and lipstick. 

Cap looked too, and made a little  _ hm _ noise as if surprised, clearly recognizing Bucky. “Yeah it is. Did he talk to you?” Cap asked. 

“Wait, that’s really--” Mom turned to look at Cap. “That’s really him?”

“Yeah,” Cap said. “I mostly came because he told me there might be a circus. I’m here to draw attention away from him and keep you guys safe. I mean, to pay my respects too, but if I didn’t think the media would’ve come anyway, I’d’ve stayed away just to keep it low-key. But he asked me to come.”

“Huh,” Mom said. 

“Yeah,” Maria said, “he talked to me. I was in the crying room with Ana and there were reporters in there, so he tossed ‘em out nice and quiet-like, and then came back and talked to me. Ana took a real shine to him, I had trouble prying her off him.”

Cap grinned. “Bucky was always pretty good with kids,” he said. “Which is kind of-- I mean, that’s what Johnny was, to us, and if I think about it too much I get a headache.” He sat back, looking glum and really young. 

“I can’t imagine how much this must be fucking you up,” Maria said. 

Mom smacked her shoulder. “Don’t curse at Captain America,” she said, shocked. 

Cap laughed. “If I’m supposed to be a superhero how is a bad word gonna hurt me?” he asked. “I used to talk like that too, you know. I can’t tell you how much work they had to do to clean me up for the stupid radio plays and all. It was awful. You know what our old neighborhood was like.”

“It just seems wrong,” Mom said primly.

“It ain’t,” Cap said. “And to answer your question, yeah, this is fuckin’ me up, it’s all crazy.”

“See,” Maria said. She put her hand on Cap’s knee. “I knew it had to be. That’s so fucked-up.”

“We were kids,” Cap said. “And-- I mean, I ran with Bucky’s crowd, I knew his family, I came to all the parties and holidays-- and Johnny was a little kid to me, and it’s-- he’s just died of, pretty much, old age. It’s-- it ain’t right.”

“Humans weren’t meant to live like this,” Maria said. 

“Well,” Cap said, “exactly. And-- we’re not-- I’m not… I’m not exactly human anymore, and I don’t know-- what that means. And Bucky--” He broke off. The limo was moving now, and he was hunched in on himself like a much smaller person. “Bucky took it real personal,” he said. “When that video came out-- he didn’t tell me, he told-- Natasha, he spends a lot of time with her. She said he really-- he agreed, he said he wasn’t himself, he wasn’t a person-- he had a big fight with her, because, well-- I mean, he’s not wrong. He’s not a human. A human couldn’t survive what he has. But he’s-- he’s himself. He’s a person. And that’s gotta mean something. And that’s-- all the politics and shit they’re getting into. I mean, for me, I guess, it’s different. I signed up for this.” He shook his head, and looked grim. “Bucky didn’t. He didn’t sign up for  _ shit _ .”

  
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> uh, explicit. Like, real _real_ explicit.  
>  Warnings for basically every sex act, plus Steve and Bucky discuss a threesome they had in the forties with a woman who may have been a sex worker, and with whom they couldn't communicate well. They aren't gross about it but it's also not the most respectful conversation that has ever happened. Natasha is the POV character and is less concerned than perhaps the situation warrants. I don't think anything actually offensive is discussed, but just maybe brace yourself a little bit, going in.   
> TW also for alcohol consumption, but nobody's consent is impaired.

  
  


James was holding on tightly to Natasha as they got into the cab, and she took over easily, directing the cabbie and pulling James’s head down against her shoulder. “Hey,” she murmured. “Steve’ll be there.”

“She was nice to me,” he said, voice muffled by her breast. She plucked his sunglasses off his head so they didn’t get crushed, and pet his hair, which was a bit crunchy with gel but oh well, she’d wrecked it already. Nobody was going to be judging him for his hair. “She treated me like family.”

“I’m assuming she spoke with her grandfather,” Natasha said. “Which means she knew what to expect from you. And she grew up with stories of you, surely.”

“I thought she’d be afraid of me,” he said. 

Natasha kissed the top of James’s head. “Will you be okay if people are afraid of you?” she asked. “Not everyone here will know what’s going on. And outsiders might find out, and we might have to get out in a hurry.”

“As long as there’s no fighting,” James said. He slid his hand around her waist. “I wish I was in a fit state to appreciate how hot you are right now.”

She laughed. “If you need distraction later, I am wearing some very nice lingerie,” she offered. “Just, keep that in the back of your mind if it all gets too much.”

“Really,” he said, and his hand moved down from her waist, down her thigh. 

“Now now,” she said. “Save it for later. But just so you know, etiquette of accompanying your boyfriend to a family funeral does include a take-your-mind-off-it fuck in the restroom, if the circumstances demand it.”

“Hot dog,” he said, and sat up. The close-quarters look he gave her, however, was not amorous, but sweetly amused. “You’re somethin’ else.”

“I have to be,” she reminded him, and he kissed her gently. 

“I have your lipstick on now, don’t I,” he said, a little resignedly, not pulling away. 

“Oh,” she said, “this is the good stuff, it shouldn’t have come off that easily.” She pulled back a little and ran her thumb along his lip. “Only a little,” she said. “Just the topcoat.”

He laughed, closing his eyes instead of trying to focus on her. “Lipstick’s different than it used to be.”

She glanced over his shoulder and saw the cabbie looking back at her, and gave him a steely look. “Almost there, ma’am,” the cabbie said disapprovingly. 

James sat up, straightening his suit jacket, and she dug in her purse for her wallet. “I got it,” he said. 

“No,” she said, waving him off. “We’re beyond that sort of thing, aren’t we?”

“Well,” he said, “when I’m pretending to be a person, that’s one of the things I remember fussin’ about.”

She put her forefinger on his lips for a moment. “Don’t,” she said. “Pretend I’m your rich super spy girlfriend.” She leaned forward and paid, tipping the cabbie moderately, and let James help her out of the cab and manage the door while she adjusted her skirt and fixed her lipstick. 

He held her elbow solicitously, but it was really for his benefit, grounding himself as they went in the door of the little restaurant. Seeing their dark clothes, the hostess pointed toward the banquet room in the back. “Murphys?”

“Murphys,” Natasha said, nodding, and James tightened his hold on her arm. 

She heard Steve’s voice before she saw anyone. He was clearly speaking to someone hard-of-hearing. “Of course,” he was saying, “yes yes, of course.” 

James hesitated, then steeled himself. “I thought that was Maura,” he said softly, as they came through the door and could see Steve speaking with an older woman, somewhat stooped and bent. “Christ, that’s-- that’s got to be--” Steve turned, seeing them, and the woman turned too, and her jaw actually dropped as she stared at James. James paused, swallowing hard, and said, “Eileen.”

The woman was in her eighties, so she’d’ve been under ten when Steve and Bucky had both ‘died’. Natasha assumed Maura had been elderly in the forties, and so was presumably dead now.

“Bucky?” Eileen breathed, staring wide-eyed at him. Natasha belatedly remembered she still had his sunglasses in her purse, and they were the only concession he’d had to a disguise. 

“Eileen,” James said, and he sounded like he’d been stabbed. He let go of Natasha, and she put her hand on his back as he took a faltering step forward. “Oh, my God, Eileen.”

“You look exactly the same,” Eileen said wonderingly, tottering toward him. Her spine was hunched, her skin papery, and her hands were gnarled with arthritis, with brown speckles and blue veins showing through; she raised them and touched James’s face, and he closed his eyes and a tear slid down his cheek.

“Eileen,” he said, and embraced her, and she held onto him, her frail hand going around the back of his head. 

“I didn’t believe it,” she said, “oh Bucky, but Johnny called me, he said-- I thought he was crazy.”

Steve had moved, Natasha noticed, and was using his bulk to hide them somewhat from the rest of the room. She stepped in to add herself to the screen, and took Steve by the hand. “Hey,” she said. 

“How is he?” Steve asked. “This is-- this is all kind of a lot for me, I can’t-- I can only imagine.”

“Someone named Maria told him he was a Murphy,” Natasha said, “so that seems positive, but I’m braced for the worst.” She looked over and caught sight of the aforementioned Maria, laden with an armload of party-dressed toddler announcing her displeasure to the room. 

“I daresay I don’t look at all like I did,” Eileen was saying, holding James’s face between her hands. “Oh Bucky.”

“You look like Maura,” James said, managing a tearful smile. “God-- I didn’t think you’d remember me.”

“I remember a lot of those days,” Eileen said. “Sadly, I’m starting to not remember what’s happening now. I’m so old, Bucky, and old age is so cruel, but I always figured it beat the alternative.”

“Dying young isn’t bad,” James said. “I wouldn’t recommend tryin’ what I did, though. I sure didn’t do that on purpose. It’s a raw goddamn deal, Eileen.”

“It is,” Steve said fervently. “It really is.”

“I’m getting us drinks,” Natasha said, looking around, “as soon as I can figure out how.”

“Oh,” a youngish man said, pausing on his way into the room. He had both hands full of about half a dozen glasses of what were probably mimosas, judging by the faint bubbling. “How many you need? I’ll make another trip.”

“Three?” Natasha said, gesturing vaguely at Steve and James. 

“Lemme drop these off to the aunties,” he said cheerfully. 

Natasha shrugged, and looked over at Steve, who was staring at the youngish man. “He seemed nice,” she said. 

“I’d wager he’s Declan’s kid,” Steve said, “or I’m blind. Wait, what year is it?”

“Grandkid,” Natasha said, “though I don’t know who Declan was, but I’m just saying.”

“Fuck,” Steve said. He looked haunted. “Yeah.”

“There you are,” someone said, and Natasha looked up in alarm, but it was the aforementioned Maria. “Somebody’s gettin’ you a drink, right Cap?”

Steve turned slightly, and smiled. “I think so,” he said. “Hey, Maria, my plus-two showed up. This is Natasha--”

The toddler cut them both off by shrieking suddenly and trying to throw herself out of her mother’s arms. “Hi!” she shrieked, and Natasha realized she was gesturing at James. 

James laughed, letting go of Eileen. “Hey, Ana,” he said, and Maria shook her head incredulously. 

“She really imprinted on you,” she said, and handed over the baby with no hesitation. James took her and settled her easily against his chest. 

“That’s my girl,” he said. “Eileen, what is this, your grand-niece?”

“Great-grandniece,” Eileen said. “I told you, Bucky, I’m really damned old.”

“Guggy,” Ana said, wrapping her arms around James’s neck. 

“How does this kid know you?” Natasha asked. 

“Like five minutes in the cryin’ room at the church,” Maria said. “I don’t know, she’s not the shyest kid but she’s not usually quite so outgoing.” She held out her hand. “I’m sorry, Cap was saying you were-- I didn’t catch your name?”

“Natasha,” and Natasha shook her hand firmly. “And you must be Maria.”

“Natasha,” Maria said, and blinked. “Romanoff?”

“The same,” Natasha said, not bothering to hide her resignation. 

“Holy shit,” Maria said, “I’m a huge fuckin’ fan.”

Something about this was possibly the funniest thing Natasha had ever heard, though she managed to keep it to a reasonably-subdued laugh. “I think I hear the family resemblance more than I see it,” she said. 

Just then the youngish man showed up with another couple fistfuls of mimosas. “Whaddaya say, Maria, they did a study and said moderate alcohol consumption wasn’t all that bad for fetuses,” he said, handing a drink to Natasha and another one to Steve. 

“Fuck,” Maria said, “I’ll have one. One, Tommy, one.”

“One,” Tommy said, handing it to her, and then he turned with the last one and held it out to James. 

“Tommy,” James said, like the name meant something to him. He took the drink, and Tommy stared at him. 

“Wait a minute,” Tommy said. “You’re-- holy  _ shit _ .”

“Yeah,” James said. “And you’re named for your grandpa, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Tommy said faintly. 

“Do you talk as much shit as your grandpa did?” James asked. “Only he was a legend for it, and it’d be a shame if you’d somehow turned out to have a truthful bent.”

“Drink that,” Tommy said, “and I’ll get you something a little more fitting, and you’re gonna tell me all the dirt.”

James laughed. “I can’t drink it without a toast,” he said. “And you’re empty-handed now.”

“Start without me,” Tommy said. “I’ll go for the refill round. What’ll you drink?”

“Manhattan,” James said. “I know they still make those, I checked. Maraschino cherries are for shit these days but they’ll do.”

Tommy laughed. “You too, Cap?”   
“Shit,” Steve said, “I don’t think I ever made it all the way through a Manhattan.”

“Try it now,” James said, “I bet you’ll do better now you got a functioning liver.”

“Check and check,” Tommy said, “I’ll be right back.”

“He’s got no fuckin’ class,” Maria said to Natasha. “Auntie, did you get a drink?”

“I have one somewhere,” Eileen said, waving a hand. “Oh, my, oh my. I should sit down.”

“Let’s get in the door,” Natasha said, looking around warily. Maria reached out to take Eileen’s arm, but James took it instead, and walked with her to a table in the corner of the banquet room. Old woman on one arm, toddler on the other, and the little girl was clutching his hair in one fist and sucking her thumb with the other, and he was managing to hold his drink in the same hand as the arm supporting the old lady. 

“I meant it though,” Maria said, “I am a fan. Anybody who can tell the Senate to go fuck themselves is my hero.”

Natasha laughed. “I’d consider it a career highlight,” she said, “but I haven’t exceeded Tony Stark’s record in that regard.”

“Sit down, sit down,” Steve said to Maria, “you’re makin’ my feet hurt just to look at you,” and they wound up in a loose conglomeration of chairs between a couple of tables, neatly ensconced in the corner. 

The little girl enthroned herself in James’s lap like she had never belonged anywhere else, and he was instantly completely at home with her, as if he’d spent his whole life wrangling clingy toddlers and not as a freezerburned, stateless assassin, and Natasha was the one left feeling like an alien.

The little girl even looked like him; though her coloring was dark like her mother’s, her mouth had the same characteristic bow as his, and beneath the distortions of extreme youth it was clear her face structure was similar to his. “Bucky was always real good with kids,” Steve said, apparently having watched Natasha for a moment. 

“Clearly,” Natasha said, and clinked her glass against his. “Bear with me, Steve, I only know how to fake this shit.”

Maria reached over and clinked her glass against Natasha’s. Natasha realized the woman had been in earshot. “Oh,” Maria said. “You know, I don’t think I’d ever really considered what it meant that you were-- what you were. Did you even have a childhood?”

“No,” Natasha said. “I don’t know what my name was when I was born, I don’t know who my family was, and I’m not complaining, but--”

“Are you,” Maria started, then looked over at James, and leaned in, lowering her voice. “Are you here like as his bodyguard, or like, as a friend, or what?”

Natasha smiled politely. “Yes to both,” she said, “and more, I do have a genuine personal relationship with James. It’s not all fake.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” Maria said a little crossly. “I told you I was a fan and I meant it. I’m not judging you for any of this, I think you’re cool.”

“I admit I was sort of curious too,” Steve said. 

“Jesus,” Natasha said, laughing at Steve’s expression, “yes, fine, we’re fucking, is that what you were asking?”

“It is, in fact,” Steve said. 

“What did she say?” Eileen asked James. “Is that your girlfriend?”

James laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “it is. Eileen, that’s Natasha. Natasha, I used to babysit Eileen when she was real little.”

“I gathered,” Natasha said. 

“Oh,” Eileen said, “that’s lovely. How long have you two been together?”

James looked at her, and she looked at him, and she shrugged. “Either six months or sixty years depending on how you define it,” Natasha said. 

“Sixty-- how old are you, dear?” Eileen asked. 

“I’m thirty-one,” Natasha said, “but apparently it’s not that simple and I’m either a clone or a doppelganger of another Black Widow agent.” She smiled sweetly. “Our lives are complicated.”

“Well, dearie,” Eileen said, “I figure you should go with whichever one makes a better story.” She patted James’s arm. “She’s a looker, that’s for sure. I hope you can keep up with her, you know, in bed.”

James laughed. “Well,” he said, “I think I do okay, for being ninety-seven.”

“That’s so fucked-up,” Maria said. “All of this is so fucked-up.” She tipped her glass back. “Shit, I wasn’t gonna drink that whole thing.”

“You said one,” Tommy said, reappearing behind Maria. 

“I meant one,” Maria said. “Take this away from me, Tommy.”

James’s family was a hard-drinking crew. Maria had a second mimosa eventually, but switched to water after that, but Natasha was pressured into accepting a Manhattan or two or three or four, and while a part of her kept fastidious internal notes on every person she met, especially the ones who did not immediately embrace James with open arms, part of her was happy to get pretty blurry on what seemed to mostly be whiskey with a faint hint of vermouth and occasional splashes of grenadine. James was inseparable from the toddler for the duration of the event, and the little girl wound up passing out on his chest.

Natasha eventually sought solace in Steve’s embrace, and sat on his lap, which was about par for the level of physical affection most of the family seemed to operate on. They were a grabby bunch, touchy-feely and casual about it, and Natasha knew Steve was generally touch-starved so she let herself lean against his shoulder and shamelessly absorb his body heat. It was a good fortification for the inevitable moment when someone said, “Are you two going to have kids?” and gestured from James to Natasha and back.

“Uh,” James said, taken aback like it had never crossed his mind even with the little girl drooling down his shoulder and looking more natural than anything ever had on him as long as she’d known him, in this life anyway. 

Natasha laughed, and let it sound as bitter as it was. “You know that the graduation ceremony to become a Black Widow agent is forcible sterilization,” she said. “I’m scorched earth, baby, scorched and salted. Steve here’s more likely to give Bucky a baby than me.”

“Well, shit,” Steve said, “why didn’t you  _ say _ so,” with more aplomb than she’d expected of him. “I’ve been wanting to have Bucky’s babies since the 30s. Let’s give this a shot! Modern science is  _ amazing _ .”

Alcohol did not affect Natasha quite normally, and she could always shake it off if needed. It dulled parts of her mind, but never switched it off entirely, so she could indulge now, could let time pass without conscious attention to threat monitoring but never actually lose her vigilance. And so she wasn’t sure how much longer it had been when she finally let Steve take her by the arm and retrieve James. 

“I think now’s the time for a graceful exit,” Steve said, and James was smiling with tears running down his face. Natasha took his arm, the real one, the warm-skin one, and left Steve the metal one, and her phone was full of Murphy phone numbers, and James’s suit coat had baby drool all down the shoulder of it. 

They all fit nicely in a cab, men’s suit-coated broad shoulders making a little dark-colored wool fort for Natasha to fit neatly into, and she took charge and leaned forward and gave the driver her address, nearly her real address, because fuck it, and she leaned back and slotted between their warm bodies and put a hand on each of their legs. 

“Your people are crazy,” she said to both of them. “That was awesome.”

“Johnny’s dead, Stevie,” James said, bewildered. “Of old age.”

“Hey,” Steve said. He was the sober one. Natasha had thought James impervious to alcohol but he’d had a lot, really really a lot, and he seemed floaty and fragile in a way he normally wasn’t. 

Normally, though, he’d have retreated long ago into solitude and pretending he wasn’t a person. “Don’t run away,” Natasha said to James. “Please, don’t run away, at least not tonight. Stay with me tonight.”

“Aw, Nat,” James said, and leaned into her, “I-- I’m okay, you know? I just, it’s weird.”

“I know where you go when you leave me,” she said, and it was calculated, but perhaps more daring than she normally would be. “And I know it isn’t anywhere good.”

James bent and kissed her temple. “I know about the trackers,” he said. “I wear those boots on purpose, Nat.”

“I thought you probably knew,” she said. 

Steve was watching them, and she glanced over at him. “Don’t judge me,” she said. “You’d put a tracking device on him too if you had a chance.”

Steve smiled sadly. “I haven’t had a chance,” he said. “I count on you for that sort of thing.” He considered her a moment, then leaned down and kissed her other temple. 

“I demonstrate my affection through inappropriately intrusive surveillance,” she said, a little glumly. 

“You do better than that,” James said. “You’re why I even bother pretending to be a person, ever.” 

“I gotta admit,” Steve said into the moment of silence that followed that, “the same goes for me, Nat.”

“I barely even hang out with you,” Natasha said. “I haven’t done shit for you, Steve.”

Steve put his hand on hers, where it was on his thigh. “You definitely have,” he said. 

“You makin’ a move on my girl?” James asked, mouth curling with-- it was trouble, that was the best Natasha could do at parsing it. 

Steve looked over at him, head tilted at an angle Natasha hadn’t seen much of. “Only if you want me to,” he said. 

“Oh, ho ho,” James said, and leaned in. His body was warm all along her side, and he murmured, right in her ear. “Has Steve ever told you about the time we shared a girl?”

“Noooo,” Natasha said slowly, turning her head a little to look at Steve. “Maybe you should tell me that story.” 

Steve leaned in a little. “Bucky tells it better,” he said, his voice a low rumble of a murmur, vibrating in his chest along her arm. 

“I doubt that,” James said, his lips brushing against her neck as he spoke, barely a hint of voice in his breathing. “I never told anybody that story, Stevie. That was never a braggin’ story.”

Natasha couldn’t help it, she tipped her head up to give him better access to her neck. “I love the way you tell stories, James,” she said, “but you know, there don’t have to be words in this story.” 

Steve let out a low rumble of a chuckle. “That’s one way of putting it,” he said. 

James kissed her neck, slow and teasing, mostly lips, a nip of teeth and a soothing touch of tongue, working his way slowly up from her shoulder to her throat. She caught her breath and tightened her fingers on Steve’s leg. “I like this story,” she whispered. 

“You oughta hear Steve’s side of it,” James murmured. 

“Oh?” She blinked dreamily, and slid her gaze over to where Steve was watching James’s mouth from under his eyelashes. “I bet I’d like that,” she said. 

Steve’s eyelashes were just unreal, how long they were, and his mouth was shiny and plush and red and she wanted him. “Would you?” he asked, letting his eyes move slowly up from James’s mouth, to her mouth, to her eyes. 

“Yes,” she answered. 

“Except this cab has a security camera in it,” James murmured, “and I can tell he just turned it on, so maybe I’m going to keep my face hidden and avoid a positive ID. Not to wreck the mood.”

“We’re nearly there,” Natasha said. She retrieved her hand from James’s thigh and reached into her purse for her phone. There was a sequence of key presses she could do without looking, and in a moment she felt the phone vibrate. “And I’ve just activated the jammer in my phone so he won’t get any footage that’s recognizable.”

“She’s a genius, Steve,” James said. 

“How could you tell the camera was on?” Steve asked, quiet but intense, and Natasha was sharply aware that he was definitely not drunk, and she’d been so careful to keep her distance from him, not to let herself want him, this was careless of her but she also had been working on wanting things and maybe she could have this, but maybe she shouldn’t. 

“Resonance,” James said. “I’m a cyborg, Steve, I got-- stuff.” He tipped his head down against Natasha’s shoulder, and she tensed, worrying he was going to get set off again, but he kept talking. “I was havin’ such a nice time pretending to be a normal person.”

“Fuck normal,” Natasha said. She put her hand back on his leg, and took her other hand from Steve’s thigh and slid it around the back of his neck, caressing him, pulling his face back to her. “We don’t get to have that but we get to have good things sometimes. Come up to my place with us and tell me your side of the story, Steve.”

“I shouldn’t,” Steve said. 

Natasha let herself stare at his mouth. She’d tasted it before, she knew how soft his lips were. “When is the last time you did something because you wanted to?” she asked. Peripherally, she took note of the street they were on. Steve looked at her, considering. 

She let go of his neck and leaned forward, sliding out from under James’s head; he sat up with a laugh. Good; he was okay. “Take a left at the light,” she said. “Then you can pull over about halfway down the block, it’s actually easier to get to from this side.” She pulled out her wallet, and by the time the cabbie had pulled over, she’d handed him the exact amount for the fare plus a polite but not extravagant tip. “That’s all set. Thanks.”

Steve hesitated, and she took his hand and pulled him with her as she got out of the cab. “At least come up and meet my cat,” she said. “James makes an ass of himself with this cat all the time.”

“Okay,” Steve said, and shut the cab door. 

“We have to cut through that alley,” Natasha said. “I didn’t give him my actual address.” She waited until the cab pulled away, then walked about ten feet down the street before crossing over to the alley. 

“I was wonderin’,” James said. He glanced over at Steve. “When we’ve been out she usually does evasive maneuvers around half the neighborhood before she’ll let me park the fuckin’ car.”

“This is not my first rodeo,” Natasha said. James stepped ahead of them, and she took Steve’s arm with hers, since she was still wearing very high heels. 

“Are you sober?” Steve asked her. “You’re not acting like you usually do.”

“I’m not entirely sober,” she said, “but then, I’m not drunk either.” She smiled up at him. “I’m in a state of learning new things about myself and the people around me. It’s been a good year for personal development.”

“You don’t really want me to,” he said, and trailed off.

She laughed. “I do though,” she said. 

James glanced back at them, smirking. “That suit fits you real good, Bucky,” Steve said. 

“I found a good tailor,” James said. He had his keys out and in his hand, and had the door open before Steve even broke stride. He went up and opened the apartment door with similar alacrity, and Natasha kept hold of Steve’s arm as they came through the door. 

James was still standing right in the entryway, working his feet out of his shoes, and he and Steve paused very close together, facing each other. 

“I want,” James said softly, eyelashes fluttering down as he looked at Steve’s mouth. He looked over at Natasha. “You, is it, I,” he said, and blushed. 

“What?” she asked, confused. 

“You said-- don’t,” he fumbled. “You said  _ don’t _ . With anybody but you.”

“I didn’t mean Steve,” she said, instantly understanding what he was referring to. “You can do anything you like with Steve. Especially if I’m there. I didn’t mean  _ that _ at all.”

James made an eager little noise, and grabbed Steve by the back of the neck and pulled him in and kissed him. Steve gasped into his mouth, and closed his eyes. Ohhhhh-- it was hot.

Natasha let go of Steve’s arm, and went to open a bottle of wine. Might as well. She got the glasses down, poured one for each of them, and turned around to watch as James pushed Steve back against the wall by the door and kissed him dirty and thorough. 

“Buck,” Steve panted, coming up for air. 

“Jesus  _ Christ _ I fuckin’ missed you,” James said. 

“Let him in the door,” Natasha suggested mildly. “Take your shoes off, Steve. Hang up your coat if you like. Have a glass of wine.”

“And then you can tell Natasha your side of the story,” James said. 

Steve bent to untie his shoes, and James came over to take one of the glasses of wine. He set it down immediately, though, and pulled Natasha in to kiss her, taking his time about it. He tasted a little like Steve. She gave herself over to it, in a way she didn’t usually, closing her eyes and letting herself rely on him to hold her up. 

“Oh,” Steve said. “Hey.” 

Liho mewed. James laughed, and gave Natasha’s lower lip another once-over before he pulled back a little. “There’s my girl,” he said. 

“Puss-puss,” Steve said, and it was exactly what James had said, that first night when he’d broken into Natasha’s apartment. 

“Were you both crazy cat guys?” she asked, glancing over to see that Steve was crouched down holding his hand out for Liho to sniff. 

“I maybe had a habit of findin’ em in alleys,” Steve said, “and kinda sometimes takin’ ‘em home, and Bucky wouldn’t ever let me keep ‘em.” 

“We weren’t supposed to have cats!” James said. “And you were allergic, they gave you asthma attacks! I wasn’t gonna have you suffocating in your sleep because a kitten was fuzzy.”

“He’d sneak back out, though,” Steve said, “and leave food for ‘em.” 

“Only sometimes,” James said. He looked wistful. “We had a couple cats when I was a kid, but we couldn’t bring ‘em to the city with us, and Dad wouldn’t stand for it once we lived in an apartment. But I grew up with ‘em before that.”

Liho deigned to rub her face on Steve’s hand, and let him run his hand along her body, but then came in and made a beeline for James, making her little purling cry that James always seemed to take as an invitation to pick her up. He did so, predictably, and she rubbed her face on his face and purred. 

“He’s occupied now,” Natasha said, and took the last glass of wine over to Steve. “That’s him sorted for the evening. Now, Steve, I haven’t forgotten, there was something you were going to tell me about.”

“Oh,” James said, “don’t think I can’t multitask.”

“I once caught him petting the cat while we were having sex,” Natasha said. 

“I’m good at both,” James said. 

“That’s not at all like the threesome story I was going to tell you,” Steve said. 

“It better not be,” Natasha said, and grabbed Steve’s tie and pulled him over to the couch. He sank down onto it and she climbed into his lap and kissed him, finally, relishing the way his mouth opened for her. 

After a long moment she surfaced and said, “You kiss like James.”

“Yeah guess who used to practice with him,” James said, and he was standing close behind her, the cat still purring on his shoulder. His pants fit differently now than they had, and she grinned at Steve. 

“Did you really,” she said. “What else did you practice?”

“Mostly handjobs,” James said, kneeling on the couch behind her. Liho, disliking the reduction in altitude, slunk off to wash herself on the other end of the couch-back. 

“Sometimes suckjobs,” Steve said, and she gave an excited little wriggle in his lap. 

“How old were you the first time you sucked his cock?” she asked Steve. 

Steve bit his lip. “Old,” he said. “I didn’t-- he used to do it to me, and then he never wanted me to reciprocate, so I didn’t think to do it until pretty late.”

“Really,” she said. 

“I was tryin’ not to make you feel like I thought you were, you know,” James said, and they both turned to look at him. He blushed a little. “A fairy,” he said. “We used to-- back then we thought of it differently, y’know? People figured they could tell by lookin’ what a guy would incline to and because Steve was little they figured he was an invert, and I didn’t want him to think I assumed that.”

“I probably would’ve been a little offended,” Steve said. “If you’d just-- you know. Expected.”

“I was fifteen when I sucked him off the first time, though,” James said. “And I liked it so much I came in my pants.”

“Ohh,” Natasha said fervently, and kissed Steve again. “I want very much to see that.”

“Me comin’ in my pants?” James laughed. “I don’t wanna, not in these pants. I think it’d take more nowadays too.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Natasha said. She ran her hands along Steve’s chest. He’d taken his suit coat off, but he was still wearing two shirts at least. She loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. “You know how good James is with his mouth,” she said. 

“I do,” Steve said, “I do.” He unfastened the buttons of his cuffs, and paused to touch her waist, gentlemanly. She grabbed his hand and pulled it up to her breast, and he laughed. “If you want,” he said, and squeezed gently, in a manner that suggested he actually had encountered a woman in this fashion before and had some idea of what would actually please her.

“I always thought you’d have clever hands,” Natasha said. James shuffled over to sit right next to them, and slid his hand along her thigh. 

“He does,” James said. She finished unbuttoning Steve’s shirt and pushed it open, then untucked his undershirt and pushed it up, getting her hands under it, feeling his belly. The skin was soft, but the muscles were right underneath, taut and firm. She knew Steve’s body, was the thing, knew all his capabilities, knew how fast he healed, knew where he could bend, knew where she could fire around him and how far he could throw her and all of that sort of thing. 

But, as she pushed his shirt up his chest, she realized she didn’t know how he would be with this, didn’t know how he would react. He was still caressing her with both hands, and managed to find one of her nipples through the fabric of her dress and her bra. He rolled the nipple between his fingers, gently but firmly enough to make her twitch. 

James leaned in, and scratched his blunt nails gently across Steve’s ribs, up under his shirt. Steve made a strangled little noise, and shivered a little. “Bucky,” he said. 

Natasha settled herself down in his lap, thighs either side of his waist. His lap was warm, but that, right there, that was probably his erection. She already knew all about his anatomy in its normal state, knew how it sat when he wore briefs under his tac gear, knew how it lay when he wore looser pants, but she really didn’t know what it would do in an aroused state. She had an inkling of how big it might be, but it was only a guess. 

“Tell me,” she said, low and husky, “about this girl.”

Steve’s cheeks had gone pink, and his eyes were glittering up at her. “Jeez,” he said. “I can’t-- it’s hard for me to think about anything but you right now.”

“Oh well said,” she told him admiringly, wriggling. Her dress had rucked up, and the tops of her stockings were showing. “If I were you though I don’t think I’d be able to get past the distraction of talking about James sucking cock. I want to know more about that.”

“I am really good at it,” James said, working Steve’s shirt off him, both shirts. Natasha had seen Steve shirtless before; he was pretty modest, but not actually shy. She’d shared a locker room with him plenty. Still, it was a sight to behold. “I’ll tell the story about the girl though. I think it was in France. She was older than either of us, nothing particularly special in the looks department but you know, she was all woman and that was enough of a change for our tastes.”

“All we’d had was each other,” Steve said. “Not that I minded.”

James laughed, and slipped his hand around to unzip Natasha’s dress, slowly. Much slower than he had to. He was teasing them. “My French was okayish. All right, it was almost adequate. I caught her looking and I was like look, we could have some fun, no? all three of us? and she thought it over and said okay. I don’t think she was actually a prostitute, I think she just wanted a piece of Steve.”

“Can’t blame her,” Natasha said. 

“Right? So we got a room, and we went up, and I mean, my French wasn’t great but it was better than Steve’s. And I was like, me and Steve, we, you know, and she was pretty okay with that. Steve and I had been talking about women, and he never had a girlfriend before the war but I did, and then he spent all that time with all those chorus girls and I thought surely he’d learned mostly what was up.” James slid the zipper down to between Natasha’s shoulder blades, then leaned forward and pulled the dress’s straps down with his teeth, kissing her shoulders. She made happy little noises and wriggled, enjoying the attention, and Steve held onto her hips and stared with his mouth slightly open. She’d been ogled plenty in her life, but there was something really gratifying in his riveted attention, in this instance. Perhaps because he was partly ogling at James.

“Mostly what I learned was that women will tell each other  _ everything _ ,” Steve said. “And most guys are lousy in bed.”

James laughed. “So I hear,” he said. “Well, I got some pretty harsh criticisms early on and I took ‘em to heart. I don’t know what other guys do.” He had removed enough of the dress to get at Natasha’s shoulder holster, and he pulled it off and carefully set it down on the end table, with her pistol still neatly fastened in it. 

“So we go up to this room with this woman,” Steve said, “and I’m nervous as hell and I really don’t think I should be there, and Bucky tells her to go sit on the bed and he’s gonna warm me up, and he just-- right in front of her, he just pins me to the door and starts lovin’ up on me.”

“If you put your mouth on a man’s dick you can get him to do a lot of things,” James said, smug, and bit Natasha’s shoulder just hard enough that she gasped. He slid the zipper down a little farther. 

“Well, you’re diabolical at it,” Steve said. 

“Mm,” James said, “I’m just enthusiastic.” 

“So Bucky gets me to the point where I’m pretty committed,” Steve said, “and then the woman-- her name was Therese, by the way-- more or less elbows him out of the way.”

James laughed, and slid his hand into the back of Natasha’s dress, around against the skin of her ribs, up to her bra inside the dress. “She did,” he said. “She wanted a piece of Steve, I told you. So I let her take over, and went to work on her instead, and she liked that, yeah she did.”

“Oh yeah she did,” Steve said. 

“I can imagine,” Natasha said, shivering a little as James went up on a knee to bite the back of her neck and unfasten her bra. 

“You know what he’s like,” Steve said. “With that mouth of his. So he gets her worked up into a state, and I kind of-- you know, lose it, you know, and neither of us knows how to explain it in French so when Therese expressed her disappointment that she thought I was done, Bucky was like-- and my French is bad but I know what he said was pretty much gibberish.”

“I told her,” James said, “I told her,  _ no worry, he do again _ , pretty much verbatim.”

“Which she found hilarious,” Steve said. “So she insisted on Bucky warming her up more.”

“I woulda been fine just keepin’ on as I was,” James said, sliding his hand into Natasha’s unfastened bra and sucking gently on the edge of her jaw. “But she wanted, you know. The whole deal. So I mean. I wasn’t gonna disappoint her.”

“It’s not like you to let a girl down,” Natasha purred. He pushed the zipper down a couple more inches, until it was at her waist. He must have made a face at Steve, because Steve suddenly let go of her waist and dropped his hands to her thighs, pushing her skirt up farther and following the straps of her garter belt up her thighs. 

“I’ve never seen any woman ride a dick so enthusiastically,” Steve said. He grabbed her by the thighs and moved them, turning so that he was sideways on the couch and James could kneel up behind her. Her leg was squashed a little awkwardly on one side, and his one leg was kind of folded under her, but the relevant parts of them were still in reasonable contact and now James was plastered against her back, hot and solid and breathing in her ear, and she was about a thousand times more turned-on than she had been.  

“Why is it so hot when you talk like that?” Natasha asked, writhing in his grip. 

“Nobody expects it from me,” Steve said. “I’d never seen anything like it, Nat, she was like to flatten him.”

“I didn’t mind it,” James said, with a low rumble of a laugh. “It got you pretty hot, watching it.”

“It did,” Steve said. “I thought I was going to lose it again just watchin’.” She could tell for sure now, with her skirt out of the way, exactly where Steve’s dick was, all along the back of her thigh. Steve pushed her skirt up further, and found the lace edge of her panties. 

“But you were the one she really wanted,” James said, gathering her skirt up in his hands, and she raised her arms and he pulled the dress up and off over her head, shaking it out and laying it with casual care along the arm of the couch. “Oh, _ Nat _ , you weren’t lying about the lingerie.”

The bra, garter belt, and panties all matched the stockings’ lace tops, all in black lace with black translucent mesh panels and bright red narrow ribbon trim. “I wouldn’t lie about that sort of thing,” Natasha said. 

“Can I,” Steve said, and James kissed her neck. She put her arms around Steve’s neck and pulled him in, and he put his mouth to her breast, right through the loosened fabric of the unfastened bra, and made the most affecting little groaning noise. 

“Fuck,” Natasha said, dizzy, “I would ride you like I stole you.”

“As soon as she saw Steve was ready to go again she put her hand on my chest and said something that I didn’t really understand,” James said, “but I got the gist when she just climbed right off me and grabbed him to fuck him instead.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Natasha said, writhing as Steve’s teeth grazed her nipple. “Oh! Oh, I wouldn’t-- I know better than to take your dick for granted, James.”

“I wasn’t really all that offended,” James said. “You haven’t seen what his dick looks like. It’s real pretty, Nat.”

“I didn’t last real long,” Steve said. “I sort of-- I don’t.”

“He goes off easy,” James said, “but then he’s ready to go again like, right away. It just means he uses up everyone’s condom ration, but nobody really minds.”

“So I gave her what she wanted, mostly,” Steve said, “but I kind of, she wanted more I think.”

“But it worked out,” James said, “because I was still, you know, good to keep going, so she just climbed off him and came back to me and picked up where she left off, and I was not going to complain at all.”

“You still took forever to finish,” Steve said. 

“So Steve’s ready  _ again _ just watchin’ us,” James said. “I mean, I noticed, and I started laughing, and she was like,  _ sacre bleu _ , which we both thought was fuckin’ hilarious. And I’m like, sweetheart, if you wanna go for it every time he gets it up you’ll be here until we all die of old age.”

“She did not understand you when you tried to say that,” Steve said. “But I was getting worried that you were never actually going to be able to finish because she was gonna keep climbing off you.”

“So I’m like, we can both do this at once,” James said. “We can think of something.”

“I just can’t imagine wanting to stop fucking you, James,” Natasha said. “Maybe I’m biased or something.”

“I am getting,” Steve said, “really,  _ really _ into this, speaking of going off easy.” He was blushing straight down his chest, which Natasha had known to expect but was charmed by nonetheless. 

“The couch slipcover is washable,” James said. “Go off all you want.”

“These pants aren’t,” Steve said. “I don’t wanna explain this to the dry cleaner.”

“This slipcover is washable?” Natasha recovered enough to look down at it. 

“How you think I keep the cat hair under control?” James asked, amused. He slid his hands up her sides and pulled her bra up to expose her breasts, and Steve groaned a little and put his face between them. 

“Oh,” Natasha said, and scratched lightly at the back of Steve’s neck, as James worked his fingers into the waistband of her panties.

“If you need a change of pants,” James said, “I got extras, don’t even worry.”

“I still,” Steve said, and Natasha came to herself enough to set to work on his belt buckle. 

“We can economize on laundry,” she said. 

“Also we could relocate,” James said. “You do have a bed, and it’s reasonably presentable and also flat and there is enough room for all three of us.”

“I’d have to let go, though,” Steve said, looking up from her breasts. 

“I know you’re strong enough,” James said. “You got the discipline. C’mon, pull yourself together.” He stood up and lifted Natasha in his arms, which she normally wouldn’t stand for, but she was pretty internally melted at this point. 

“Tell me you both fucked her at the same time,” Natasha said, as James carried her down the hall to the bedroom. He kissed her hungrily, deposited her on the bed, then immediately turned and shoved Steve against the wall by the bedside table, unfastening his belt and kneeling to pull his pants down. 

“Mmm,” James sighed, as Steve stepped out of his discarded trousers. He was still wearing boxer-briefs, and James hooked his fingers in the waistband and looked up, wicked and sinful and Natasha writhed a little just watching. 

“Please,” she said, “oh, James, please, suck his cock, I want to see that.”

“I’m,” Steve said, “I can’t, it’s gonna--”

“It’s okay,” James said. “Stevie. It’s okay.” He pulled Steve’s underwear down, and sure enough, Steve had a really nice big well-balanced dick.

“I’ve never seen a  _ pretty _ dick before,” Natasha said, shoving herself up on an elbow. 

“It is, though,” James said. “Right? It’s uncanny.” He gazed at it, more or less lovingly. Natasha had anticipated it would be hot, to see them interact, but she had severely underestimated. 

“Bucky,” Steve said, almost a whimper. 

“I missed you, baby,” James said, wrapping a hand around it, and looking up at Steve under his eyelashes. 

Steve was staring at him with a desperate expression, and Natasha knew that look-- he couldn’t bear to look away but he was already on the edge. “Oh Steve,” she said. “Oh. Sometimes I come before he’s even really touched me. I know exactly how you feel.”

“Fuck,” Steve said, and his dick was leaking, and his thighs were trembling. “I can’t-- oh god.”

“It’s okay,” James said. Natasha rolled partway over, shoving a pillow between her thighs because she needed pressure there to steady herself. 

James opened his mouth and swiped his tongue across the head of Steve’s dick, then took it into his mouth, and Steve shuddered, grasping futilely at the wall with both hands. “Fuck,” Steve cried, “Bucky!” and his hips jerked. 

James moaned, closed-mouthed, and bobbed his head, working along Steve’s length, and she knew he was certainly doing something exquisite with his tongue. Steve made a desperate, high-pitched noise, letting his head thunk back against the wall. James kept his head moving, eyes closed,  _ committed _ to sucking Steve’s cock, and Natasha shivered, grinding against the pillow as she watched Steve’s whole body jerk and twitch with the unmistakable throes of orgasm. “Oh,” she said, panting, “oh Steve, oh, I know, oh, oh,  _ oh _ !”

James opened his eyes, looking hazy and distant, and pulled lazily about halfway off Steve’s cock, making a dreamy, satisfied little humming noise. His jaw worked slowly, eyes half-open; he was gently sucking Steve’s cock, careful not to overstimulate him uncomfortably. 

Steve gave a shaky laugh. “Did you just get off too?” he asked Natasha. 

“Uh-huh,” she said unsteadily. “Fuck. The French girl. Did you both fuck her together?”

“I didn’t think it’d work,” Steve said, “but  _ yeah _ , we did.”

“Mmm,” James said, letting his eyes roll back a little. 

“I have never in my life wanted to try that,” Natasha said, “but I think I’d make an exception.”

“Whatever you want,” Steve said. “I, Bucky, oh God.”

James pulled off, grinning. “He’s ready, I told you,” he said. 

“Get your goddamn clothes off,” Natasha said. James had taken his jacket off but was still wearing everything else. Including the camoflage sleeve under his real sleeve, and that had to be getting uncomfortable. 

“Fine,” James said, getting to his feet, “fine. Oh Nat. You look so fuckin’ delicious.”

“Clothes,” she said unsteadily, “off, now, I want to see you.” 

He stretched languidly, unfastening his belt, unfastening his cuff buttons, looking down at her. Steve was still intermittently shivering against the wall. “Why don’t you get your socks off, pal?” James said.

Steve laughed, and sat down on the edge of the bed, shucking his underpants the rest of the way. Natasha pulled him over to her as soon as he’d finished with his socks, and he came easily, running his hands over her body. “You still got your shoes on,” he pointed out. 

“Leaving them,” she said. Nice fully-fashioned stockings held their shape better with shoes to keep the feet in place, and these also were really hot shoes and she hadn’t worn them all day just to shed them as soon as things got interesting. 

James unfastened the front buttons of his shirt, pushed it open, and watched them watching him. “I feel like I should have music for this,” he said. 

“You don’t need it,” Natasha said, putting a leg over Steve so she could grind on his thigh. His cock was mostly hard again, and she ran her hand along it experimentally, biting her lip. 

“So,” James said, pulling off the dress shirt. He slipped his hand inside the neck of his undershirt and toggled the mesh sleeve off, then pulled the t-shirt off and set to work carefully peeling the mesh sleeve down his arm. “So this woman. I figured you know what, get Steve in her and let him fuck her a little bit until he shoots off, and then he stays where he is, and while he’s just that little bit soft, I can get in her too. So I do this, she’s lying on him and I’m behind her, and sure enough, it worked pretty great. And by the time I was in, he was ready again, so it actually worked pretty well. But I was really glad she was facing him because she scratched the shit out of his back and about lost her mind.”

“That’s so hot,” Natasha said, and Steve bit his lip, working the waistband of her panties down her hip.

“I wanna touch you,” Steve said, “I wanna touch him, I don’t even know what I want.”

She leaned in and kissed him, biting that lower lip of his, hanging onto his neck. “Steve, baby,” she said, “whatever you want. I already get as much of James as-- well, not all I want, but enough, and you’ve been missing him all this time. I want to see you taken care of, Steve.”

James sat down on the bed and she jerked her head up to look at him. He was pulling his socks off, and then stood to take his underwear off, and Steve rolled onto his back to gaze at him with wide-open longing. 

“Doesn’t he look good,” Natasha said. 

“Yeah,” Steve said, and James leaned over and kissed him. 

They were so beautiful, Natasha suddenly had trouble breathing. It was a weird feeling in her chest, like-- was she going to  _ cry _ ? Or-- she wasn’t sure. Fortunately they were busy enough with each other that she had a little space to just breathe and stare at them. It was-- it wasn’t physical beauty, though they were objectively attractive, all sculpted muscle and pleasing proportions and  _ whatever _ , as James would say in his videos,  _ whatever _ , encompassing and dismissing all in one. 

He was so-- much. And Steve. And it radiated off them, and there they were right next to her, brilliant as stars, gravitational. “My good boys,” she said, feeling herself pulled in to their orbit. James reached out and slid his hand up her side to cup her breast, and Steve put his hand out and clumsily clutched at her hip like a drowning man. She let James tug her in, arm going around her waist, and he turned his head and kissed her too, so hard and so deep her head rocked back. 

“Look at her, Steve,” James said, almost pleading.

“I see,” Steve said, and pulled her panties down. She was wearing them correctly, over the top of the garter belt, so he could pull them off her without disrupting the stockings. He sat up finally, breathing hard, flushed from his cheeks to his waist, and pulled her panties off with both hands. 

“You gotta,” James said, “Steve,” and ran his hand along her body like he was presenting her.

“Natasha,” Steve said. “God, Natasha, you’re-- can I--”

“Anything you want,” she said shakily; she was caught up in them now and it was too late to try to take charge. “Anything, baby.”

James wrapped his arm around her, pulling her partway into his lap, putting his mouth against the side of her neck, kneading her breast with a hand, and Steve caressed her belly almost reverently, then moved his hand down and brushed his fingers between her legs, tentative and exploratory. She moaned a little, encouraging, and he circled his fingertips, getting his bearings, before delicately pressing first one, then two of his fingers into her. 

She’d already come once, so there wasn’t any resistance, and he made a heartfelt noise and immediately added a third finger, motions going from tentative to sure and deft, and after a moment she was panting and rocking against him as he fucked her with his hand. She’d thought him inexperienced, but he clearly knew how this worked. 

“Fuck her,” James said. “Steve, you gotta.”

“Do you want me to?” Steve asked her.

“Yes,” she said, shivering. 

“Lie down,” James said to Steve, “c’mere,” and Steve leaned in and kissed her, fucking her steadily with his fingers, and she cried out, muffled by his mouth. 

“Okay,” Steve said breathlessly, “okay,” and rubbed his thumb across her clitoris as he pulled his fingers out. She shuddered, hard, and James pulled her into his lap and kept rubbing at her with his fingers, teasing her, not putting them in, while Steve lay down. 

“This okay?” James asked Natasha, and when she nodded, bodily lifted her onto Steve. She managed the coordination to get herself positioned, and then sank down onto Steve’s cock. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she said, because it was a lot of cock to take, even turned-on as she was. 

“Is it okay?” Steve asked.

“Yeah,” she said, wriggling experimentally. She found the right angle and made an involuntary, heartfelt noise.

“Oh, yeah,” James said, “that’s good, isn’t it?”

“Fuck,” she said, and started moving. “Oh,  _ fuck _ , Steve.” Steve groaned, and settled his hands on her hips. She shivered, and began to move in earnest, angling her hips to take him just right just  _ there _ like  _ that _ like  _ yes _ , and James knelt up behind her, taking her breast in his hand, moving the other down to press the heel of his hand against her as she worked, and she cried out and shuddered, so close so fast, “Steve,  _ fuck _ ,” and she was coming, hard, shaking and gasping, spasms wringing through her. 

“Natasha,” Steve said, urgent, fervent. 

“Steve,” she said, and then, because his mouth was pretty much on her ear, “James,” and James held her as Steve shuddered and bucked under her, completely losing composure as he came too. 

There was a moment, as they mutually shivered and stuttered to a halt, both breathing hard, and Natasha sagged in James’s grip, trusting him to hold her up. 

“That was a wild ride,” James said, low and rumbling in her ear. 

“Jesus Christ,” Natasha managed. 

“It’s a good thing he don’t last long,” James said, conspiratorial, “or you wouldn’t be able to walk after. Thing is, though, if you stay there he’ll get hard again.”

“Fuck,” Natasha said. Her heart was beating so hard her cunt was throbbing with it; she was all awash with the good kind of endorphins, and wet and sloshy and slippery and sweet with it, and she should really take a break and drink some water; about half of her wanted to curl up and go to sleep and the other half just never wanted to stop fucking. “Oh, fuck, James.”

“Natasha,” Steve said, low and soft, and she made her decision and pushed herself up so that he slid out of her. She bent down and took his face between her hands and kissed him, slow and deep. 

“You’re so good,” she said. 

James put his hands on her hips, and her lizard brain suddenly made the connection that she was now on all fours in front of him, and he was on his knees behind her, and he was definitely hard, and she wanted to fuck until she died. She made a fervent little noise, kissing Steve again, and wriggled her ass toward James. 

“What do you want, Nat?” he asked, caressing her hip. 

“Fuck me,” she said. 

“If that’s what you want,” James said, and lined himself up and pushed into her without further ado. 

“Oh fuck,” she said breathlessly, and pushed her hips back against him, taking him to the hilt in one push. 

“Jesus,” Steve said, under her, looking up, and she kissed him again, and bit his lip. 

James wasted no time, but pulled on her hips, fucking her easily. He knew her well enough to know how to get the angle right; by his third thrust he was lined up perfectly, hitting her just where she needed pressure. “Steve,” he said, businesslike, “help me out, give her a little love.”

Steve honest-to-god whimpered, and kissed her, collecting himself enough to put his hands on her, finding a nipple, finding James’s hand on her hip, then finding her clit and setting to work with his fingers. “Wait,” Steve said, and wriggled, and James got it and paused while Steve wriggled his way down the bed. 

“What,” Natasha said, as Steve disappeared underneath her, but then he tilted up and his tongue was against her, and she made an incredulous noise. 

“Yeah,” James said, and went back to fucking her. It had to have been difficult for Steve to maintain the position, but he went eagerly to work on her with his mouth, hot and wet and soft, as James fucked her, hard and perfect. She cried out, and shuddered, bearing down on James’s cock, her spine stiffening as another orgasm started to collect itself there. “Fuck,” she gasped, “fuck, James, fuck!”

“Yeah,” he said, low and fervent, “c’mon.”

“Natasha,” Steve said, like he was at prayer, muffled underneath her.

When she came she threw her head back, shoving herself back against James and holding herself still there, clamping down on him and shuddering. He groaned, and so did Steve. Steve didn’t let up, but redoubled his attentions. James locked his arms around her chest, holding her still, pressed deep into her while Steve worked at her, and she sobbed and came again, and as Steve didn’t let up, came a third time, with James starting to move inside her again like he couldn’t help himself. 

“Holy fuck, Natasha,” James said breathlessly, and shivered, then said, “Steve!”

Steve groaned, and she sobbed at how good it felt, grinding down into his face, against James’s body, her hands wrapped around James’s arms, her whole body trembling. 

She came one more time, and Steve let up then, pulling his face away, lying back a little, looking up at her. James rocked her against himself, and she shuddered, maybe another orgasm or maybe just an aftershock, clenching around the length of his cock, moaning with every muscle spasm. 

“Let me fuck you,” Steve said to James.

“Fuck,” James said, and he was so turned-on she’d never heard him sound like that. “I don’t know if Natasha’ll let me pull out, she’s got me in a death-grip.” 

She just moaned, and collapsed forward as he let her go. He pulled out of her slowly, and she was so oversensitive it made her come again, whimpering and clenching, and he fucked her through it maybe involuntarily-- he was pretty close, she could tell with the tiny part of her mind that was still capable of situational analysis-- but then managed to pull the rest of the way out. He was breathing hard, and not thoroughly in control of himself.

She rolled over onto her back, moaning, beyond speech, and Steve sat up and kissed James like he was starving for it. He’d been fingering James’s ass, she realized, and probably using her mess as lube, which was probably adequate but not ideal. With a supreme effort of will, she rolled over and retrieved the bottle of lube she kept in her nightstand, and handed it to Steve, who took a moment to figure out what she was doing. 

“You want that too, huh?” he asked, managing a breathless laugh. Fortunately he didn’t need an answer, because she didn’t have that kind of mental capacity. 

“Fuck,” James said unsteadily. 

Steve worked James open efficiently with one hand, watching him raptly. Natasha lay and caught her breath; her cunt was throbbing, and she couldn’t decide if she were done, or dying for more. She could go either way with it. 

James was gorgeous, overstimulated and vulnerable and trembling, clinging to Steve and making no attempt to recover any kind of self-possession. “I got a thought,” Steve murmured to him. 

“Dangerous,” James pointed out. 

Steve laughed. “What if I get in you and you get in Natasha? I bet that’d be good.”

“Fuck,” Natasha said, and she had to bring her hand down to rub at her clit, making herself shiver. 

“I’ll be done in three seconds,” James said.

“I won’t last a whole lot longer than that,” Steve said. “It’s me, you know?”

“God,” James said, and he had opened his eyes, now, and was watching Natasha rub herself. “Oh, my God, maybe, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Natasha said encouragingly, pulling her foot up and cocking her thigh outward, alluringly.

“Okay,” James said. 

“All right, then,” Steve said, and pulled his fingers out of James. He turned James around and gently manhandled him into position. 

“Wait,” Natasha said, and grabbed a pillow, shoving it under her hips. This left her head downhill, but she wasn’t really worried about that.

“Oh, that’ll help,” Steve said. 

“Get in him first,” she said, because she wouldn’t be able to handle the awkward maneuvering, she thought. 

James bent over her, kneeling, and lowered his head to take her mouth. She kissed him sweetly, and felt him shudder as Steve’s fingers moved in him. 

She broke the kiss and tilted her head so she could watch Steve line himself and push in slowly. James caught his breath, and stared blankly over her shoulder, brown creased in concentration as Steve slid into him. He made a soft, fervent noise, tipping his forehead down against her shoulder, and she put her arm around his neck, playing with his hair. 

“You take it so pretty,” she murmured. “Oh, James, look at you. You deserve to feel good. We’re gonna make you feel so good.”

He breathed hard, not quite making any vocal sounds, and Steve held his hips and petted his back. 

“Buck,” Steve said, sounding almost broken, “oh, Buck, I missed you, God.”

James groaned as Steve sank in the last inch or so, and rocked his hips. “Fuck,” he said. “Oh,  _ fuck _ , Steve.”

Natasha gleefully picked up her feet and wrapped her legs around James and Steve both, digging one of her spike heels into Steve’s flank a little. “C’mon, loverboys,” she said. “Make this work.”

The humor caught James just right, and he came to himself enough to grin at her. “You know I can’t resist a challenge,” he said. 

“Jesus, Nat,” Steve said, voice a little strained, “those shoes are hot.”

“I know,” she said. “You gotta be the driving force, here, Steve, for this to work.”

“I don’t have to do any work,” James said. “This is ideal.”

Steve rolled his eyes a little, but it was true, his body position was going to dictate how well the whole thing worked. He held James firmly by the hips, and Natasha angled herself carefully, and after a moment they managed to get things lined up properly, and Steve pushed James into her. 

“Holy shit,” James said, eyes closed, tipping his forehead down against her shoulder. Natasha breathed deep and gripped James’s waist with her thighs. It wasn’t quite the right angle, and she wriggled, trying for a better one.

“Can I,” she said, extending one leg, and Steve caught on and helped get her leg bent up, knee hooked over James’s shoulder. Steve held her gently by the calf, and turned his head to kiss her leg just above the knee, and thrust into James at the same time, and it was the tenderest, hottest moment Natasha had experienced so far today. 

“Fuck,” James moaned, and bit her neck. 

“Like that, huh?” Steve said, and Natasha nodded, wordless. 

She came first, James’s teeth in her shoulder and his cock driving into her with tremendous weight behind it, Steve’s hands gentle on her legs, James mostly taking the weight but passing enough of it on to her. She threw her head back and made as much noise as she wanted, and shuddered and shuddered, and it wasn’t too long before she wrung James shouting over the edge, his face buried in her neck and his whole body shaking with it. 

Steve didn’t last much after that, and came hard, jerking and shuddering into James, who passed it along to Natasha, and she clamped her thighs down and rode it out, holding onto the bedsheets for dear life. 

“Fuck,” she managed, half-strangled, as Steve collapsed down onto them, “don’t squash me, don’t squash me!”

James got his arms under himself and pushed up off her a little. He slid out of her and she needed a moment to collect herself before she could retrieve her leg. 

“Holy shit,” Steve said, and managed to slide sideways before he collapsed entirely, rolling onto his back. 

“Budge over,” James said, and sank down between them, arm heavy across Natasha’s waist. 

“That was amazing,” Steve said. 

“No shit,” Natasha said. She lay panting there for a few moments, catching her breath; her limbs were so heavy, she could just sink into the bed. But she wasn’t a super soldier, and she’d enormously regret it if she didn’t get up and take care of herself.

So she eventually collected herself enough to crawl out of bed, go clean up the barest amount, and get a glass of water. When she came back, Steve and James were curled around each other, zonked right out like a couple of kids.

It was really adorable, she thought, drinking her water and leaning against the back of the armchair in the corner, thighs too weak to hold her. She unfastened her shoes, and shucked her garter belt and stockings, and pulled on a giant t-shirt before climbing into the little corner of the bed that was left over for her.

James cracked one eye open a sliver, saw that it was her, and reached out to pull her against him, tucking her into the hollow of his shoulder like she belonged nowhere else. 

She fell asleep before she could think better of it. 

  
  



	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not the kind of emotional fallout you'd expect.  
> Also, Natasha gets shot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Would you believe, I wrote this first.

  
  
  


Enroute to a mission wasn’t the time for conversations like this, so Natasha pushed it aside. It knocked around in her head, as it had been doing for days, and with it, all its baggage, all the memories she’d neatly compartmentalized about it, everything she knew about herself that it wasn’t productive to stare deeply into for prolonged periods. 

James knew something was bugging her, he was sort of good at that, even though it wasn’t something he’d ever have done as the Winter Soldier. He hadn’t done the kind of shit she had, hadn’t been under cover, hadn’t blended in, hadn’t relied for survival on sussing out hidden motivations. But he was good at it anyway.

He had all kinds of skills that had nothing to do with his time as the Winter Soldier, and all kinds of memories, and it wasn’t fair, Natasha had only the things she had built for herself out of the ruins, had only a hollow shell they’d trained her to be, had nothing else to draw from. 

He caught her shoulder as they geared up, put his hand really gently under her chin, not like a handler would, not like even a lover would. But like a mother would, and that caught at her, under her ribs, and she looked up at him. “Hey,” he said, inspecting her face, but it wasn’t-- he wasn’t looking for weaknesses, wasn’t trying to catch her out. It was-- it was definitely parental, or maybe sibling-like, and she’d have no idea what any of that was really like, she only knew how she’d been trained to copy it, she was a hollow shell of a thing. 

“I’m all right,” she said, full robot, he wouldn’t be as upset by it as other people. But she’d miscalculated, because he’d know what it meant more than anyone else. 

“You’re not,” he said. “But you’ll fight well. And I guess that’s what we’re looking for.”

“It is,” she said, blank, inflectionless. It was hard to focus on his face. 

“Come to me,” he said, and pulled her in, enfolded her in an embrace for a moment. “Nat. Come to me.”

“I’m okay,” she said, a little more herself; his body was so familiar, so solid, he smelled of home, he smelled of their laundry detergent, he smelled of the life they occasionally lived and that she knew would not last. She didn’t get to have these things. 

“You’re not,” he murmured. “You gotta tell me. After, okay?”

“I will,” she whispered. She didn’t know how. She’d figure it out. 

 

After, she was bleeding, and she cursed herself for her sloppiness. Her opponents had been good, it hadn’t been anything obvious, but she should have been faster. Feelings made her inefficient, and it was surely feelings she was having. 

It was a bullet wound, in her thigh, but it hadn’t hit the artery, had just mangled the big muscle a little, and he stripped her out of her tac suit and saw to her efficiently, big hands gentle on her body, and he spread the metal hand across the back of her thigh and chilled it down, like a big icepack, taking the swelling down as he pried the bullet out and stitched her up with the other hand. Along with the morphine he gave her, it dulled the pain and she floated, and she trusted him, and she loved him, and that was wrong and stupid but it was what it was. 

He dressed her, and it wasn’t at all like having a handler dress her, he kissed her shoulder and her collarbone and her belly and her hand, he kissed her arm and her cheek, he smoothed her hair back and did not say empty silly words, he just told her it would heal and she could sleep. She lay in his lap and that was when she remembered it, what had been bothering her, with her cheek against his thigh. 

“I love you,” she said, which was part of it, but it wasn’t something she was good at, and it wasn’t all of it. And he wouldn’t believe her, not if she said it like that, he would know it was only easy to say because she had so much practice saying it to defend and disarm.

He petted her hair. Cars so rarely had bench seats so this was nice-- and she shouldn’t have her head anywhere near the steering wheel, but she needed to be touching him, she needed the warmth of his body, the ice packs he’d strapped to her injured leg were so cold and her body was so far away. But it was the truth, what she’d said, it was the truth, and he didn’t believe her.

“Did I give you too much morphine?” he asked, a gentle tease, and she turned her face into the warmth of his femoral blood vessels and the smell of his body, he smelled like sex-- not sex in particular, but his body was a body she had sex with, and so it smelled of itself and that was a sex smell, to her. And not a sex-for-defense, not sex as a weapon, but sex for comfort, sex for desire, sex to make her human and make her happy-- which, in her current state, sounded like a myth, or something that only happened to other people. She couldn’t remember what  _ happy _ really felt like.

“I don’t need drugs to feel love,” she said, or maybe she didn’t say it out loud, but she was hurt, and would have cried. She normally wasn’t aware of it, but sometimes she knew when she would have cried if it hadn’t been conditioned out of her. She knew, she still had that awareness or maybe had studied it to bring back a simulation of it, because those were good cues for when to feign emotional distress. But she wasn’t feigning emotional distress. She was actually-- well, was she really actually feeling emotional distress? Surely it wasn’t something most people would have to consider so deeply. 

“I know, baby,” he said, and she must have spoken out loud. Careless. She never would have been like this, drugged, before. He was making her soft. “It’s all right,” he said. They weren’t at their destination but he was slowing the car. “I’m gonna stop, get a motel,” he said. “We’re outside the search radius, and I don’t want to keep on with you like this.”

“It’s not safe to have my head so near the steering wheel,” she said. 

“That’s what it is, doll,” he said, and left her in the car, and she should sit up and look alert but she didn’t. He went in with a bag, checked them in, presumably. He was gone a bit, and she drifted, and then he came back and carried her in and she didn’t care, she laid her head against his shoulder. He kissed her head and she didn’t look around. 

She hazily managed to sit in the bed and watch him check the room. He went and showered, and came back in a towel and looked at her where she hadn’t really moved. 

“Is it wearing off?” he asked. 

“Ice packs have gone warm,” she said. 

“You want more?” he asked. “We got more.” They were the chemical kind, that you cracked to activate. She shook her head.

“I’m cold,” she said.

“I got you,” he said, and cracked a single ice pack, set it right over the dressing, padded it with a washcloth, and pulled her into his lap in the bed. 

She wanted to kiss him but he was too far. Moving would hurt too much. She was being too passive, too trusting. Treating him like a handler instead of a comrade. He was drinking one of those awful starvation-peanut-butter protein shake things that she knew he subsisted on when he wasn’t cooking for her. He needed a lot of calories, it pleased her that he saw to his own routine maintenance so well. 

“Damage status?” she asked him. She hadn’t asked him. She should have. People who cared about each other checked up on each other. 

“I’m undamaged,” he said. 

“I’m almost certain the bone isn’t compromised,” she told him.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Just tell me if it hurts, Natalia.”

She sighed, and nestled against his chest, and he smelled like hotel shampoo now, but also like himself. It came back to her, then, what had been bothering her. “I do love you, though,” she said. 

He laughed softly, and kissed her, above the hairline. “You’re a treasure beyond price to me, Natasha,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

She pondered how lucid she was, and how she ought to give him shit about how corny that was. “You’re a cornball,” she managed finally. 

“I’m  _ your _ cornball,” he said. He tipped his head down, regarded her. “Hey. You’re back.”

“I’ve been here,” she said, grouchy, but he was right, she had been pretty zoned out. 

He picked his head back up, then rested it against the top of her head. “I know you’ve been here,” he said. “But there’s you and then there’s you, and I miss you sometimes.”

“I’m always me,” she said, small and sad, and he sighed and squeezed her a little tighter. 

“I know,” he said. “And I’m not pestering you. You don’t really have to tell me. I just feel like I need to point out that I notice when something’s up with you, because it matters, Nat.”

“I get it,” she murmured. The remote was on the side table, she could turn on the TV and he wouldn’t say anything more, but she knew she ought to tell him, because it wouldn’t stop bothering her. 

She sighed. Yeah, she was lucid enough to do this. Time to prove that emotions didn’t make her soft and useless. They made her complex and strong, and harder for someone to take apart again. “I don’t wish I was normal all that often,” she said. “But there are a couple things that I know mean the opposite thing to me that they do to normal people and I kind of wish I could get them back. That’s all.”

The way he pressed his cheek a little harder to the top of her head she could tell he understood that this was her picking the harder road in the interests of personal growth. Fucking personal growth. Ugh. “That’s all, huh,” he said, but it was gentle and wasn’t dismissive. 

“It just sort of slid over me at the time but when you said to Steve,” and she had to pause. 

He kissed the top of her head when she didn’t continue, and it made her collect herself. 

“When you said to Steve that if you put your mouth on a man’s dick he’ll do just about anything,” she said. 

“Fuck,” James said, muffled in her hair. 

“I mean, it’s true,” she said. “And that’s-- it’s  _ true _ . I’ve-- done a lot of that. That’s all. And I just-- it made me so jealous to watch you two-- not at the time, I was mostly just really fucking turned-on at the time, but-- James.”

“Baby,” he said, and his voice was thick, like he was hurting. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” she said, “it’s not-- don’t be sorry. It’s not, like, bad memories or whatever. It’s just-- I wish I could do that for you, but I know if I did, I’d-- forget. I’d forget that I was doing it because I wanted to. I’d get lost, and I couldn’t-- I really couldn’t bear it, to start thinking of you like a mark, James, I couldn’t.”

“Oh Natasha,” he said, but he wasn’t disgusted, she’d known he wouldn’t be, and it was pleasant to know it wasn’t a worry. It might even be selfish; she was with him, perhaps, because she knew of all the people in the world, he wouldn’t be disgusted by anything she’d had to do, or had thought was all right at the time. 

“Until I watched you two,” she said, “it wasn’t anything I’d ever thought about. I’d never really wanted to do it for its own sake, it had always been a pragmatic thing, a simple exercise in power, no big deal; I did it because I just wanted to, a time or two, because I wanted to exercise that kind of leverage over whatever partner I was doing it to even though I didn’t need it, even if they weren’t a mark or a mission or anything, just for fun.” She shrugged. “But watching the two of you,  _ god _ \-- it was so hot, James, and I wanted to do it, then, for its own sake. And I wished, then, and I wish now, that I could do that to you, because I would really enjoy it.”

“Oh Natasha,” he said, and she knew he was crying, and she was pleased to see how empty of any real power the thought was that came up to remind her that crying was weak, because fuck you, he was a new definition for the opposite of weak, and it was enormously satisfying to her to watch her internal definition of him as not-weak crush the old definition they’d put into her. 

It wasn’t enough that she’d feel  _ she _ could really cry, anytime soon, probably, but it was really something. God, these emotions-- this whole  _ feelings _ thing was intense. 

“So I guess,” she said, “I’ll take it, knowing that I think that’s hot and I’d love to do it. But the cost is that I know I shouldn’t, I can’t, because you’re not that kind of thing to me.” She tipped her head back to look at him, to look at how beautiful he was, how fucking terrifying and strong he was, and how he had tears, for her, running down his cheeks. She traced one with her finger, dreamily. “So I’m sorry, baby. I bet you’d get off real pretty for me if I could bring myself to do it. But I don’t need any more power over you than I’ve got.”

He put the backs of his fingers against her cheekbone, and smiled soft and sad, for her. “For the record,” he said, “it’s never been my favorite thing. I like doin’ it a lot more than I like gettin’ it.” 

“Which is good,” she said, “because if it were I think I might have noticed that and done it anyway, and I don’t like to think about what it would be like if I started thinking of you that way.”

He rubbed his thumb along her jaw. “It wouldn’t be insurmountable,” he said. “You know that. You and I, we can pretty much figure anything out.”

She smiled at him, brightening at that revelation. So far many of the things she’d learned about herself had been limitations, but he-- well, he was the opposite of weak. If there was something impossible she wanted, he could probably get it. It was like a sunrise, in her mind. “We can,” she said, and he looked almost dazzled by her, and that wasn’t something she was doing to him, that was something he was doing because of her. 

  
  


She fell asleep and she woke up in his arms with him watching her like a big sap, and she was in pain and grumpy and yelled at him because of all the possible lines of attack for any enemies coming for them here her sleeping face was the least likely, and he laughed and kissed her and got her a new ice pack and another half-dose of morphine and she went sleepy and pliant and let him carry her into the shower and hold her up while she washed her hair and rinsed off, and let him comb her wet hair out and dress her, and let him kiss her all over and carry her out to the car and drive her for fast food breakfast and the long slog back home. She gave a mission report from the car, including “and I got fucking shot, but estimated healing time is under a month,” and nobody hassled her. 


End file.
